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
