On Being Free: Black Identity And Pursuit by Khalil Somadi

I must agree that Africans in America who are descendants of slaves are indeed different than Africans born and raised in Africa. We have been socialized differently; our blood was diluted by that of whites for the most part also. Therefore some of us do not identify as African, and some of us do.
It is our right to be able to choose based on our individual views on our place in our history, a history which is tied to the histories of both Africa and America.

Africa is my Motherland and I claim and honor her as such. I will forever regret the culture I was deprived to know through no initial free choice of my own.
I am a displaced person, because my mother and her mother and father and their mother and father were displaced people. I do not claim the land of my ancestors' bondage as "home".

My great grand mother and father on my father's side first came to the Caribbean from Sierra Leone. My father was Jamaican-born,  as am I. When I was fourteen I moved with my family to America,  my mother's place if birth, to Washington, D.C. where I grew up. Systemic racism reigns here, and it reigns in Jamaica as well; it affects the lives of black people globally. While recognizing our diasporic differences, I also recognize our sameness in our right to be free of systemic oppression which Others us on whichever part of the globe we dwell.

Unity in rising against oppression is what is most paramount to me, and that includes a choice in how we identify and why as well as pursuit of formal retribution for all that we lost generationally in the 'fire' that was slavery.

MLK said "We shall overcome one day". Overcoming is a process, just as our marginalization was a process; and "one day" begins Today.

#OnePeopleOneLove

KS