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“Three Parts African”: Blood, Heart, Skin, and Memory

The CWC’s “African born in America” leadership, in other words, African Americans, had a three-part definition of who was African. According to a key CWC “African” leader who was a locally well-known African American activist, an African was a person who was “black in skin color or race; has an ancestry that ties them to the continent of Africa; and has an African spiritual identity, meaning that you identify with the intellectual tradition that you are part of creation. Do you view the world as interconnected, or do you have an objective, technological view of the world? Who was African cannot be defined by one of these traits in isolation from the others. “It’s a matter of a both and—not an either or.”¹

At the most fundamental level, in the CWC’s three-part framework, an “African” was anyone who was “Black.” “Blackness” and “Africanness” were often used interchangeably, although they were not necessarily synonymous. From the perspective of the CWC leadership, if one was “Black,”² one was also “African,” regardless of whether a person self-identified and/or self-described an African heritage as a primary and defining component of his or her ancestry or identity. In the words of an African American CWC leader, “Either you’re born African, or you are not.”³ Here the notion of “Blackness” was more than just phenotypical features, particularly skin color. “Blackness” also included a sense of cultural principles and memory which happened to be manifested, in part, through skin color. For example, Nefertiti, the African Soul Movement (dance) teacher, who was also a very active CWC participant, explained to me that “Africans in America were taken from the land. Continental Africans had the land taken from them. Until we can take the land back, our grounding as Africans is in our way of thinking, our history, our symbols, our principles. If we want to be whole, it can’t be about geography. Although I was not born there [in Africa], there are things that I do that are African and it has to be counted—I keep them through the vibrations of skin and memory.”⁴

For many African American CWC participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America,” an African cultural memory was retained in the body through the skin. This sort of skin-absorbed, retained memory—not skin color alone—constituted “Blackness.”

The CWC had an ongoing class called Old Ways of Parenting for Young African American Parents. The class functioned like a support group and was facilitated by a key CWC “African born in America” leader. The topic for one session was a discussion and analysis of the ways that mothers, grandmothers, or other senior women in their families influenced the participants’ parenting styles. A friendly debate developed around whether certain parenting practices were “genetic” or “genealogical”—inherited through biology, or learned from observing the practices of one’s mothers and grandmothers. Someone in the class, a regular and active participant, mentioned that the discussion represented the classic nature/nurture debate. Several of the women maintained that most behavioral traits, including “memory, talent, mental/psychological disorders, spirit, attitude, stress, and mannerisms” were genetic—according to one participant—“inherited through the skin.”⁵

Despite the inclusion of “Blackness,” partially indicated by skin color, as a component of Africanness, the CWC leadership’s theory of African identity was not easily explained as exclusively biological or racial. In fact, several CWC “African born in America” participants were very adamant and vocal about their rejection of the term “black” as a racial category. For example, Sandra, an “African born in America” who was in her forties, explained it this way:

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not offended by the term “Black.” I like Black, actually, because I went through this whole, “I’m Black and I’m proud” thing. So, I actually like Black, but I’m trying to teach my children “African” because there are so many negative things—even though their dad says “Black”—I just want them to know that there are so many negative things that are out there in the media connected with the word “Black,” that they hopefully don’t internalize the negative affects that come from that. I think those things were put there on purpose to denigrate us … I just think that the reality is, in a global sense, that Africans still refer to ourselves as being Black. So I think in that sense it’s OK … I view myself as Black. I’m not so sensitive about it. There was a time when I was kind of more with the African, but I’ve softened that more.⁶

Sandra was also a licensed social worker who worked in the Minneapolis public school system. Originally from Mississippi’s Delta area, she had lived in Minnesota for almost two decades. An impassioned community advocate, she had also lived for a time in Thailand. She was married to a man who was born in Somalia and had very interesting insights on intercultural issues in African American and African communities.

Sandra had also been involved in a grassroots Black study and community action group called Asili, which in Swahili means root or foundation. Founded in about 1987 and disbanded in 1992, the group explored participants’ African heritage. Although the group was open to both men and women, women seemed to be the most active of the almost one hundred participants. A respected African American university professor and community activist, whom Sandra described as their griot, mentored the group. Asili could be seen as a precursor to several of the African-centered nonprofits that emerged during the mid-1990s.

One technique I used to further elicit insider perspectives on African identity was to explicitly ask some key participants to review and comment on various versions of guides used to facilitate ethnographic and life history interviewing. Sandra, the same participant cited above, went through an early version of an interview guide and changed every lowercase “b” to an uppercase “B” in the term “black.” When I asked her why this was important to her, she said, “Black is more than skin color. It’s a group of people with a spiritual base.”⁷ Elaine, another CWC participant who described herself as African or African American, depending on the context, explained why she thought that skin color was not the primary indicator of who was “African”:

This country is still divided by skin color. And it’s not just White people. It’s affected us. My father—God rest his soul—was jet black—like Nat King Cole. My mother was light like a Lena Horne. Now my great-grandmother, who raised me, did not want my mother to marry my father because he was dark. We are divided along the color line. We are some of the worst offenders. So, some people say “black” and they say “ugly.” They say “black” and they say “stupid.” “Black” is always seen as denoting something negative. But when I say “Black,” I’m using it as a category for a group of people—not for skin color. Because you can have light skin and still be Black and African … Being African is about the way you think—not just about what you espouse but where you stand and what you do …

So, you know there are people who are mixed—they might have a Black mama and a White daddy but if they think like a African, they can be African; after all they need some way to define their identity. But to me they’re still African even if they don’t accept it … You know, even if they [White society] gives them probationary White status, it’s only for a while and they need to have some place where they are accepted.⁸

Elaine, who was in her fifties, was a prominent attorney and health care professional who was an executive at a public agency. She was also a leader in several professional African American women’s social clubs.

For Elaine, a person was also “African” by virtue of having African ancestors, not only because of having phenotypical characteristics that may be described as “Black.” According to CWC “African born in America” leadership, along with race, skin color, or bloodline, the second component of who was “African” at the CWC, as indicated above, was “an ancestry that takes you back to the continent of Africa.” In its simplest form, this ancestral theory of African identity maintained that a person was African if she or he had living relatives of African descent or could claim a more remote ancestor who was born in Africa. A person who had some African ancestors will also be thought to have some African blood. If one did not know one’s specific African ancestors, being Black was considered sufficient evidence of a primarily African ancestral origin. In this case, a person may be considered “African” by virtue of ancestry even if she or he did not self-identify as such.

However, it should be noted that from the perspective of the CWC’s key “African born in America” leadership, “if a person of African descent persistently denies or disowns it [his or her African ancestry], a person can lose all connection to her African heritage. So, yes, you can be black in terms of skin color and not be African … Africanness is primarily ancestry and spirituality—skin color is not as important.”⁹ So, a biracial person, if she or he continually rejected his or her African ancestry, may “become something else—not African.” Sara, who was a CWC African leader, described a counseling session with a very emotionally distressed “biracial” woman which illuminated these notions of embodied Africanness. Sara was a key participant in this study and the official representative of its values, mission, and programs. Born in Mississippi, she had lived in the Twin Cities for twenty-five years where she was a prominent community activist around health issues. The founder of an elders’ network and rites of passage program for African American girls, she was the recipient of local, national, and international recognition for her innovative community programs.

I met with this young woman—about twenty-seven or twenty-eight—who didn’t have a trace of Blackness in her. In the way she talked—the way she talked about her experiences is very different from other Black women. You know, Black women have this way of talking to other Black women. We put our hands on our hips, standing akimbo, look you straight in the eye, and tell you just what you need to know and don’t want to hear. I knew instinctively—although she didn’t say a word about it at first. But I knew that she was very disconnected from her Africanness … Then she revealed that her mother was German and her father was Black. And until that day she had not had an experience with another Black woman. Can you imagine going through your life as a Black woman and not having that experience? Sickness is just this disconnection between the psyche and spirit.¹⁰

“Blackness” here had to do with the elder’s interpretation of how the woman presented herself—her style of both verbal and nonverbal communication, not skin color. “Blackness” was the embodied Africanness partially represented through skin color, behaviors, and ways of thinking that demonstrated at least a subconscious and, ideally, a conscious connection and identification with even a partial African ancestry. In a follow-up to this discussion, I asked the elder how she would approach her work with this participant. She explained:

a biracial person is someone of multiracial heritage who needs to reconcile within themselves the multiplicity of parentage. I would work with this person to become spiritually grounded in an African spirituality. I would help them use journaling—writing their own stories—to listen to their own thoughts … In 90 percent of the cases, these people become reconnected. But there are some cases when a person continues to say “I’m not [African]; I’m something else.” The ancestors will not continue to own you if you continue to deny them.¹¹ I know there are some people who think that once a African, always a African. But the disconnection can become so great, where it’s complete. You can just look at them and tell. This complete disconnection, this severing the tie is brutal, and sometimes it’s too late.¹²

In such a case, persistent denial of the embodied drive towards Africanness would decouple Blackness from African identity. Such a person might be black in the sense of a skin color or some other phenotypical feature, but no longer be Black, that is, possess Blackness or Africanness in the CWC sense of cultural identity. While the CWC’s “African born in America,” leadership made this subtle distinction between acknowledged and accepted “Africanness” and “Blackness,” other “African born in America” participants maintained that a person who is “Black” will always be “African” regardless of whether they accepted it, largely because Africanness was considered indelibly marked on the body through, as the participant quoted above put it, “the vibrations of skin and memory.”

An African ancestry may or may not be immediately evident from a person’s appearance. A biracial person may not necessarily be deemed to look African or black but would be considered “African” once a partial African ancestry was known, for example, a child with an African and a European parent. Another ethnographic example helped to clarify this point. In a meeting of the Health and Wellness Committee¹³ to plan a special project to devise a community “report card” with indicators of African American health status, there was an exchange about whether the term “people of African descent” was appropriate. Ultimately, the CWC’s key “African” leader decided that the term “people of African heritage” was preferable over “people of African descent.” In her words, “the term ‘people of African descent’ might exclude people where the direct line of African ancestry has been broken. The word ‘heritage’ includes everybody with African roots.” In this definition, African heritage, regardless of whether it is recognized, accepted, or self-defined by a biracial person, would take precedence in defining the identity of people of multiracial ancestry. One CWC participant of African heritage who worked in the public school system and happened to be married to a continental African, explained that “one of the issues for the public school system in working with multiracial children is that eventually—sometime usually when they are teenagers—the African inside of them comes out. They’re searching for their African self but don’t know how. As result, they sometimes act out in school, but the school system doesn’t know how to work with parents to help them.”¹⁴ According to this participant, the latent African inside the body will eventually come out—this African identity was stronger than the other identity of biracial children and will naturally and ultimately direct the identity of people of mixed ancestry.

However, not all “Black” participants who would be described by the CWC leadership as “of African heritage” agreed with this perspective. For example, Joanne, a health professional with a Ph.D. who described herself as “ethnically African American,” was married to a “White” man, and had a biracial biological child and an adopted child whom she described as “looking black,” had a very different perspective. Joanne, in her forties, was an executive at a large public health agency. Her approach to identity was also informed by her stay in Haiti and Benin as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1980s. Joanne made a distinction between her “ethnic” identity and her “cultural” identity.

Ethnically I am Black or African American, but I’m more a part of middle-class American professional culture. Practically—I mean on a day-to-day basis—that’s how I practice my culture. I would say that as someone married to a White person with a biracial and a Black child, I just represent a late twentieth-century African American and all the contradictory, mixed up things that involves.

I would not say that I’m African because I’m not. I lived in Africa for several years in Benin as part of the Peace Corps. Although that was a long time ago—over twenty years—I know that there are a lot of cultural differences. In fact, the people there thought of me as White although to most people here I definitely look Black. I also worked in Haiti in some villages and I would say that Haitians are closer to African than African Americans, although I could fit in better there because people often saw me as part of the Creole intelligentsia since I was considered light and am well-educated.

I don’t believe that you’re suddenly African because you wear African clothes, look black, or have lots of African art. It’s more than that and there are real cultural differences. My children are African American but they are not, culturally speaking, African even though some of their ancestors are African. American society will see them as African American—with all the stigma that’s attached to that category—whether they like it or not. What about my husband’s ancestors? So, I can’t say that they [the children] are exclusively African.¹⁵

Mavis, another participant who described her identity as “African American,” and who would be described as “African” or “of African heritage” by the CWC leadership, made an implicit distinction between political and ethnic identity. Mavis, in her thirties, worked as a clerk at a hospital and had moved to the Twin Cities about ten years earlier from inner-city Milwaukee. She was also part of a CWC support group for people with diabetes.

For me, being African American means dealing with stress and a lot of illness and an economical situation where you don’t have a lot of money. It is also means not being able to step out of your door without being bothered by people. I would say that my ethnic group is African American, but to me African American and black are the same thing. African American means that I am American because I was born here and I should have the same rights as any other American person. Really I’m American—a black American. Anyway, that’s what the government says; you know the whole thing that if you have even one drop of African blood you’re black. So, in a way, if a white person is born and raised in Africa, they’re a “white African” just like I’m a black American—their ancestors are European, but they are African citizens. But you know for those white Africans, they are usually rich and make the black Africans suffer and then they [black Africans] end up needing to come over here. But yeah, I guess you would still call them [white Africans] “African” …

The African or black part means that my ancestors are from Africa. In fact, that’s what I’ve been told by my mother and father—that their ancestors in the South [southern United States] were from Africa. But you know how we are. My father is a mixture of African and Indian, but he was always claiming that he was Irish or something else. But for black folks—somebody—somewhere down the line—came from Africa, even though people don’t accept it …

Some people are really into the African stuff and because their ancestors are African, they say that “Africa is my home”—even though they might be from the south side of Chicago. For me, my ancestors are African, but Africa is not my home. I would be lost if I went there because I can’t speak the languages. Some people are into the African stuff, but I’m realistic. Being African American means that you have this special understanding and identify with what your African ancestors had to deal with, but personally I’m from Milwaukee—I’m American and want my due here.¹⁶

This participant, while conscious of an African ancestry, would not describe herself as “African” because, for her, place of birth or political citizenship was the most significant component of identity. Therefore, even though she acknowledged that she had African ancestors, she defined herself as African (for ancestry) American (for place of origin) to underscore her rights as an American citizen. She did not see the “African” part of her identity as relevant in terms of her current lifestyle or cultural practices—only as a referent for ancestry and the North American racial classification of a “black” person.

For many CWC participants who described themselves as “Africans born in America,” the term “African American” was explicitly rejected as an accurate descriptor of cultural identity. Nefertiti, the CWC’s African dance instructor, represented this perspective well. “If you ask Black people about their identity, they will claim that they are anything else but African—Irish, Indian. They’re so quick to be in line with everything else … But when you begin to understand what “American” really stands for—this whole false history about the land of the free and brave stuff—how can you say you are both African and American [as in the term African American]? … I prefer to say “people of African descent.” This is a more holistic name. You can choose to take on a nationality but your culture stays with you.”¹⁷

In the very early phases of this study, I asked the CWC’s medical director, who is a licensed pediatrician and a Haitian woman of African heritage, to review an initial version of my research plan. Throughout the document, I used the term “African diaspora” as it is commonly used in scholarship to include individuals with historical origins, however defined, based in the African continent. The medical director, who self-identified as “African,” explained to me, “We just prefer the term ‘African.’ There are so many ways to divide us: ‘African American,’ ‘Afro-American,’ etc. that we just say that people are ‘African’—basically all these people are Africans.”

I went on to explain how the term is used in anthropology and that my goal was to accurately represent CWC participants’ understanding of their own identity, not impose my own. However, I would need to use terms like “Africa diaspora” to translate the CWC’s worldview into terms nonparticipants could understand. She accepted my explanation, but throughout this research I was careful to use and document participants’ self-descriptors. This approach, while occasionally the focus of gentle ridicule, helped me to establish and retain credibility as a native ethnographer while exercising the discipline’s expectation that I present the emic perspective.

Elaine described herself as both “African” and “African American” depending upon the context:

… I would say that I’m African in terms of how I personally see myself. Being African refers to how I got here—my connection to the Middle Passage. It’s also my skin color. I don’t care how White people act and how considerate they are, skin color still matters.

So, yeah, skin color is a part of it, but not all of it. Because being African also has to do with how you live. So, my upbringing was different. When I was coming up, everybody in my neighborhood had something to say about what I was doing. It could have been the town drunk, but if he stopped my mother while he was sober and said, “Mrs. Smith, I saw Jane pulling up her dress and dancing on the curb,” my mother would believe him and I would get in trouble for it. Being African means—but this is not true so much today—being raised in a village. And I think this is something we kept going from Africa, even though we may not be aware of where it comes from.

But there is also an internal piece to being African. It’s got to do with spirituality—what you think and what you believe. It’s the whole way I think about myself. I am extremely cognizant of who and what I am and where I come from—who my ancestors are and the whole Middle Passage.

Now although I think of myself as African, I don’t always call myself “African.” I sometimes use “African American.” When we have to fill out government forms or applications and they give you some options for heritage or identity, you would usually not see “African.” That’s because some people take exception to not seeing “African American” because they want to make a distinction between those that came here involuntarily—“African people born in America” and “African people born in Africa.” You know, also society often defines identity in terms of where you were born—your citizenship … but your ancestry can make you African even if you weren’t born there.¹⁸

The CWC’s “African born in America” leadership would explain the above participant’s experience of being raised in a village as an extension of “African intuition.” In the leadership’s construct, Africanness was “intuitive,” felt and experienced in the body, not only through the skin or the blood but also through the heart. As explained by an elder, a very active CWC participant who describes himself as an “African,” born in the Caribbean, the shared components of African culture cannot be explained or reduced through “European” or (by extension) anthropological categories like race, history, or socialization, because they are “spiritual” and understood intuitively. In many contexts, several participants, particularly “Africans born in America,” spoke of the “intelligence of the heart” to refer to a subconscious sense of what are considered core and constant African cultural principles. For example, one ongoing discussion in the African parenting support group focused on helping participants be assertive in various family, work, and community relationships without being offensive. The group facilitator, a CWC “African born in America,” leader advised them to follow the “intelligence of the heart”: “Africans have a kind of sensing to know and predict what is happening. You can strengthen it. It’s an intelligence of the heart, and the CWC can help you develop it. We, as Africans, function almost exclusively at this level of knowing.”¹⁹ In another session, when discussing the same topic, the group facilitator explained that the intelligence of the heart was “being in touch with one’s spirit as indicated by good intuition—know it when you feel it and how to interpret and apply it. Intelligence of the heart is speaking the truth—knowing when to say it; how to say it. Don’t give up being African, whatever religion or philosophy you practice, don’t give up being African. Do what you say you are going to do.”²⁰ “Blackness” was a sort of bodily vessel for holding this intelligence of the heart and the African cultural memory that accompanied it.

At a workshop on understanding African culture presented to students—who were primarily European—through a partnership between the CWC and a well-known area medical school, a key CWC “African” elder encouraged them to “remember to focus on relationship building, using your intuition and reading nonverbal behavior when working with African Americans.²¹ Africans work from this basis. Your instincts will be critical in the healing process because it’s part of our cultural health practices.”²² From the perspective of CWC leaders, particularly participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America,” this intuition—this ancestrally informed and skin-embodied intelligence of the heart—was a distinctive way of knowing what made an individual of some African ancestry, however remote or “mixed,” “African,” regardless of place of birth, nationality, or current country of residence.

While many “Africans born in America” participants regularly referred to the skin as the locus of Africanness, Blackness, or a historical memory of an African past, for many “continental Africans,” that is, African immigrants, Africanness was not primarily retained in the skin or heart, although the skin, and other phenotypical features, could be an external indicator of Africanness. Instead, they made more frequent reference to “the blood” as the defining component of who is African. In the words of a professional Somali woman, Haidia, who worked with the CWC and lived for many years as a teenager and adult in several Middle Eastern countries and the United States:

Your culture, your ethnicity is determined by blood—your blood origin. It’s the natural way of things. Your origins have to do with who your ancestors are. It’s not necessarily geographic because your ancestors stay the same no matter where you are living. But your ancestors tend to be from the place you were born. So, I am Somali first, because that’s who my ancestors are, and African second because Somalia is in Africa. Whether I say I’m Somalian or I’m African depends on who’s asking and how much they know about Africa. If I’m traveling in Europe and talking to someone from there who asks me “What’s your culture?” or “Where are you from?” if it doesn’t even seem that they even know where Somalia is, I might just say something general like, “I’m African.” But if they seem to know something about Africa, I would probably tell that I’m Somali. If they are from Somalia, I would tell them my village. Since my children also have Somali ancestors, they too are Somali even though they live here in America.²³

For several continental African CWC participants, a person of African blood or ancestry would need to consciously define himself or herself as African, consistently do certain things, and/or think in a certain way to “keep their culture” and identity. Haidia, cited above, continued:

HAIDIA	To keep Somali culture alive, you need to tell stories from the old country. Do things like take children for visits back home, speak the language, and maintain your social relationships so the children know who they are. But losing some of Somali culture is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the thing you’re losing from the old and what you take from the new one [American culture].
JCC	What about the people you call African Americans? [I had heard her use this term in other contexts] What do you mean when you say that they are African American?
HAIDIA	[Pause] This is a tricky question. African Americans can be Africans because they do have some sort of African ancestry. However, some African Americans don’t want anything to do with Africans or Africa. If they accept their African heritage, then they can be African. If they reject it, then they are not.

Akin, a Yorùbá immigrant from Nigeria who was a manager at a local nonprofit organization and part of the CWC’s African elders’ council, presented his perspective on African identity in the following discussion:

JCC	What about people not born in Africa who have African ancestors but also other ancestors, are they African?
AKIN	I would consider them African. I consider all African Americans African.
JCC	How is that? Why are they African, even though they may have not even visited Africa or have no idea what their original culture was?
AKIN	The part that they don’t know does not mean the fact is not there. That is different between the reality and what we know. And the fact, to me, as far as I know, is that their family tree is from Africa. If they cannot trace—if they are somewhere here and therefore they cannot trace this part, it’s a different issue … [referring to a sketch he made of a family tree to represent his notion of African American heritage]. And, therefore, you think you are an American because you were born in America, but I still consider that person African. So, the part that the person cannot locate—where in Africa and when and who—does not mean that he is not African. Another example is if you see Irish, they still claim to be Irish. I talked to somebody at the conference today who said, “I’m Scandinavian,” and even though … his parents are born here in America, he still claimed that. I think it’s only among the African Americans that this is not common. The Germans, they say, “We’re from Germany,” even though they were born here. Even you see people living essentially within proximities. That’s an area is known to be German area, that’s an area that is known in America to be Scandinavian areas, Irish areas. The city of Milwaukee, they said is a German city … So that’s the way I look at things. As a matter of fact, I look at people from the Caribbean as African. Let me expand a little bit. The difference between nations, nationality, and the origin is different to me because it’s just like an English person—it could be in Canada, it could be in Switzerland, it could be anywhere—that’s their nationality. Africans in Cuba, their nationality is Cuban. Those that are in Brazil, their nationality is Brazil. But their origin is Africa. That’s the way that I look at it.
JCC	So, the fact, for example, that most African Americans or what some people would call Black people that I know don’t speak an African language, and we mentioned the fact that they may not know their original African culture, that’s not relevant to the origin?
AKIN	That’s not relevant to the origin because even within Africa we are beginning to see African people who cannot speak African language … who cannot speak Yorùbá because they went to nursery school, kindergarten, and from there they go to English speaking school. So, my kids don’t speak Yorùbá now … There are some people in Nigeria who can speak French like anything, more than English. But that does not make them to be a French person. Language is something we can acquire or decide not to acquire …24

I first met Akin in a meeting with the CWC director about a new project and state contract that he had to provide culturally appropriate family planning counseling to women of African descent. He was exploring how to collaborate with the CWC in providing these services. Akin was also very active in Ẹgbé Ọmọ Odùduwà,²⁵ a Twin Cities-based mutual aid society for Yorùbá immigrants. Akin identified strongly as Yorùbá but also identified as African. In a less formal conversation than the interview session excerpted above, he said that he would describe himself in some contexts as a “Nigerian,” but for him Nigeria was a political artifice created by the British that was no longer tenable. He supported Yorùbá efforts to secede from Nigeria and form an independent country because the “Yorùbá can make it on their own and will never get their due in Nigeria because it’s dominated by the North.”

Interestingly, as implied in the interview citations above, continental Africans, even those who like Akin, above, insisted that “African Americans are African,” in everyday conversation made a classificatory distinction between “African American” and “Africans.” However, the fact that a terminological distinction was made by continental Africans between “African” and “African American” did not mean that CWC African immigrant participants did not consider African Americans “Africans” in some sense. The semantic distinction between “African” and “African American” seemed to be more a statement about the specific place of origin rather than cultural identity. Interestingly, the term “African American” as used by both continental Africans and “Africans born in America” never referred to African immigrants who had American citizenship. Such individuals still referred to themselves as “African” or in reference to their country of origin or African ethnic origin, for example, “Somali,” “Liberian,” “Yorùbá” and so forth. Even if they had American citizenship, no CWC continental African participant described himself or herself as, for example, Somali-American, Yorùbá-American, or Liberian-American. CWC African immigrants seem to reserve the term “African American” to distinguish between people of African heritage—those who Akin also called “African descendants” or “African descents”—who were born here, particularly those whose ancestors arrived in North America through the seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, and those who were born in Africa and emigrated to the United States more recently.

As indicated by Haidia above, depending upon the degree of specificity required for a particular conversation, continental Africans may have also described themselves by their country of origin or ethnic group; she was both “African” and “Somali.” Similarly for Akin, he strongly identified as “African” and “Yorùbá.” The identity that was most prominently expressed or acted upon depended on the context. When speaking about Nigerian national politics, whether he was in Nigeria or at a Minneapolis meeting of Ẹgbé Ọmọ Odùduwà, Akin most strongly identified as Yorùbá. However, in most American social and political contexts, he most strongly identified as “African” in contradistinction to Europeans, Asians, or other non-African-derived American ethnic groupings. For CWC continental Africans, there was no apparent conceptual conflict between an “African” and “tribal” identity.²⁶ They identified as both, although how they described themselves varied according to the particular social or political context. Indeed, much of the CWC’s work can be seen as providing African diasporan participants, both American- and African-born, a conceptual model for defining and positioning their translocal identities: for example, what it means and how to be African, Yorùbá, and American all at the same time.

African immigrant participants, who maintained relationships with family members living throughout the world, made a subtle distinction between “political” and “cultural” identity that was more prominent than among those CWC participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America.” For African immigrant CWC participants, the correspondence of blood origins and place of birth with ancestry was incidental; place was not the primary determinant of African cultural identity, but it was for political identity.

Both CWC participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America” (African Americans) and African immigrants—who generally referred to themselves as “Africans”—saw African identity primarily as a matter of ancestry. However, for “Africans born in America,” equal emphasis was given to physical indicators of “Africanness” based on notions of “Blackness” as sometimes externally indicated by skin color.²⁷ While African immigrant participants also had a sense of physical indicators of Africanness based in part on skin, primary emphasis was given to ancestry as determined by blood or biological relation or ancestry. However, as will be described below, physical indicators of “Africanness” were given more importance among those CWC Africans who have experienced racial discrimination in North American or European countries.

African immigrant CWC participants tended to have a stronger sense that people of African ancestry should make a conscious decision to define themselves as African to be considered such, although there was significant variation on this point. Those who had worked with the CWC’s “African born in America” leadership the longest (for example Akin, quoted above) seemed to share the view that an African ancestral origin, even if unknown and unacknowledged, made an individual “African.”

Those African immigrants who were newer to the CWC had the sense that self-identification as “African” was a necessary prerequisite for African identity. One could not be “African” unless one perceived and described oneself as such. Because of the strong emphasis placed on the combined notions of “Blackness” and ancestry, participants who described themselves as “Africans born in America” tended to believe that people of African heritage were still African even if they actively rejected or denied an African ancestry. Continental African participants, almost unanimously, maintained that people born and raised in Africa who did not have an African biological ancestry, regardless of level of acculturation—for example, White Kenyans or White South Africans—were not African in terms of cultural identity, either attributed or self-ascribed. However, because of the African immigrant distinction between political and cultural identity, people of European ancestry could be politically African in terms of their nationality. Most African American participants who described themselves as “Africans born in America” maintained that such individuals were not African by any definition—they were “Whites” or “Europeans” living in Africa. The participants of African heritage who did not define themselves as “African” and instead defined themselves as “African American” or “Black American” placed more emphasis on place of birth or citizenship in defining identity. For them, people not born and raised in Africa could not legitimately define themselves as “African,” although their African ancestry was recognized by the inclusion of the terms “African,” “Black,” or “black” in their ethnic descriptors. For self-described “African Americans,” people of European ancestry could be “African” if they held African citizenship or were born in an African country.

CWC “Africans born in America” tended to justify a common “African” identity across the diaspora in part because of a shared history of racism and discrimination. For example, Sandra, an “African born in America” school social worker, described this commonality in spiritual terms:

I feel more of a connection with Africans around the world than I do with Europeans…. It’s just a natural, kind of spiritual connection. So, it’s like if you’re talking to a family member, you’re more likely to share. But then other people from other cultures can also be very interested and make a good connection and you can be more intimate too. It just kind of depends. But, there is something special about and is spiritual with African people … It is a shared heritage. A shared sense of suffering. I think that wherever we are on the planet, we have had some degree of suffering that is historic and that continues based on the color of our skin.²⁸