Nappy Headed Black Child

For awhile I have insisted on being defined as as African. When i started this there was a sense of pride i derived from it. But as of late it has begun to fad not for lack of love for the land of my ancestors but because its not specific enough. Africa is not a monolithic whole and I am very limited in my ability to be much more specific than a region. I always say so much of the experience of the Diaspora African in America is about finding a place. Where do we fit? We are so hated here in America and often look to Africa as a home and yet have more in common with the very same western world that oppresses us than the land that we acknowledge as home. As my own search for my ancestral home i see how separated I am. Regardless of how I feel about it I am a westerner. I have more in common functionally with the west than i do with varied peoples of Africa, that i am connected to by heritage.

In my mind if one is claiming to be African and is seriously interested in that being a reality, repatriation is academic. Eliminating and undoing our separation has to happen and folding ourselves back into the land we call home and its peoples makes sense. But lets say if I repatriate today and go home my future children and their children possibly even my future partner will be African but I will always be a westerner. And it saddens me because that means referring to myself as an African as opposed to a man of african descent in an appropriation of an identity that i only have a marginal claim to. I suppose this is what its like to be moses in the biblical account of him looking into the promised land knowing that he could never really be apart of it.