The Sunday Story: "I didn't know I was Black until I came to this country"
26:53 Share

Leah Dinella is an editor on the NPR podcast Code Switch, so she spends a lot of time reading reports on demographics. She's always looking for trends that might lead to good conversations, and we know Code Switch is full of those good conversations. But one day, something caught her eye. A

A new finding in a Pew Research report. For the first time ever, the report noted one in 10 black Americans is an immigrant and many have settled in the South. You're listening to The Sunday Story. I'm Aisha Roscoe. This statistic got Leah wondering what it must be like to be a black person in the U.S., but not from the U.S.,

What does it feel like to confront the kind of racism that is unique to this country? How does it affect one's sense of identity? Leah joins me now to talk about some of what she's learned after months of reporting. Hi, Leah. Hi, Aisha. How's it going?

Well, so I got to ask you, you got started on this project because of that statistic, that one in 10 Black Americans are immigrants. Why did that statistic surprise you? It surprises me because a lot of times when we talk about the Black experience, we're not necessarily talking about immigrants. Yeah. I mean, it probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did because I

A lot of my friends are black immigrants. So even though I know a lot of people who fall into that category, often when we're talking about

issues in the U.S. We're not talking about immigrant issues. And a lot of the time when we hear about immigrants, people are not generally referring to black people. They're referring to people from Latin America, people from South Asia, East Asia. Yeah. I think part of the reason for that is also because a large portion of black immigration in the U.S. is pretty recent. A lot of the immigration is only within the past like 20, 25 years. Okay.

The other thing that surprised you was that the largest share of these immigrants were settling in the South. I'm from the South, raised in Durham, North Carolina, and we all know the South is a very particular region of the U.S. I grew up there, so I can say that. Did you expect a different picture of where these Black immigrants would be settling in the U.S.? I definitely did. The image that I had of

Black immigration was largely kind of centered around New York City. There are huge Black Caribbean populations in New York City. And then, you know, there's obviously also other kind of hubs like Minneapolis. So, yeah, I was surprised to...

to read that about the South. What is the percentage of Black immigrants that are in the South? More than 40% of Black immigrants are in the South. And so you took this nugget of information and you did what great reporters do, which is you decided to go deep in and find the layers behind this and the stories behind the numbers. Did you have a central question that you were trying to answer as you started reporting?

Yeah. My big question was, how do Black immigrants kind of define and understand what it means to be Black?

And how does that definition kind of change the longer that people live in the United States? And I was interested in that because over the years, I've had a lot of discussions, sometimes arguments with my friends about this topic. As a Black person who is not an immigrant, I often have had really different kind of ideas or conceptions about Blackness than a lot of my friends who are immigrants. What did you feel like the difference was?

I mean, I remember one conversation really specifically where one of my friends who was originally from Kenya was talking about how she didn't identify as black because she didn't really feel like she had ownership of that or like she wasn't like entitled to claim that because, you know, the word blackness is so commonplace.

tied to this history of Black American slavery, Black American resistance, that kind of thing. Okay, like Jim Crow, all these things, and she's saying that's not her story. Exactly. But to me, hearing that, I was kind of like, well, no one...

chooses to be Black in a certain way. Blackness is something that's ascribed to people and then you make it, we Black people have made it into a culture and an identity, but it's not something that I felt like you could opt out of in the same way or not claim. And so you chose to focus on Black immigrant populations in Tennessee. Now I got to ask you, why Tennessee? Yeah.

Yeah. I wanted to be in a place that was, I felt, a really good kind of encapsulation of all of the, both all of the, like, caricatures and stereotypes that people think about when they think of what the South is, but also is this place that has all this nuance and all this complication and contradiction. So, you know, Tennessee, I think, is really interesting because it's got all the heavy hitters of American racism, right? Like,

It was a slave state. It's the birthplace of the KKK. There were tons of lynchings happening there, massacres against black communities. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee. So that history is all very alive in the state. It's also home to so much black culture, right?

resistance, all kinds of black scholarship and art and music. In Nashville alone, there are five HBCUs. And then, I mean, Nashville is one of the most international cities. There are immigrants from all over the world, Egypt, Ukraine, Mexico, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, like all of these places are represented.

in the city. So I thought it was an easy place for people outside of the state to kind of talk about in really, like really one note way. But it's a place that's really full of all of this complexity and richness and different elements of what it means to be American. But let's start meeting a few of these people who you talk to. Where should we begin?

So I will start with one person. Her name is Queen Titile Cascaza. That is a beautiful name. It is a great name. So what is her story? Well, she's truly a jack of all trades in some ways. She's the multicultural affairs manager for the city of Memphis. She's also a belly dancing instructor, an occasional real estate agent, and she's the author of a children's book called Nubian Mermaid Adventures. Okay.

She decided she needed to write this book when her daughter was about five years old and in a very deep mermaid phase. And here's the story she told me. So I tried to get her all the mermaid things that I possibly could. And I could not find not one children's book with black mermaids in it. Not one, you know.

So she started wanting this long blonde hair or long red hair. And I was trying to tell her, I said, we're Ethiopians. So this was obviously before, you know, Halle Bailey and the new Little Mermaid switched up the game. This was before that. Yes, this was eight years ago. So what is her backstory? How did she wind up in Memphis?

She came to the U.S. as a 15-year-old in 1987, and at first it was just her and her brother. And the reason for that was because my parents' friends lived here, and there was a war. They were taking teenagers, so...

You know, we were just out in the next flight available. She had had what she described as kind of a sheltered childhood. So when she got sent to the U.S., she didn't have a lot of warning and she didn't really understand why she was having to leave. I didn't want to leave my friends. My life was perfect as far as I can remember. And then all I know is it was perfect, then it wasn't perfect.

So I was angry, really. And I mean, it also was not exactly a smooth arrival when she got to Memphis, starting high school in a brand new country where she couldn't fully understand English. It was a lot. My first week in school, I almost got beat up because I didn't know who MLK was.

I didn't, you know, because it's unfortunate, but we didn't learn Black history back home, you know? Oh my goodness. The kids there might have felt like, you don't know who MLK is? Like, there's no understanding. There's no empathy, right? I mean, and this is Memphis too, right? So like, this is the city where MLK was assassinated. She has no idea what's going on. So did it eventually get easier for her?

Yeah, it definitely did. It was a learning curve. But when she went to college, so she went to the University of Memphis, and she started being really intentional about learning about Black history there. I purposely took Black history for two semesters, and

It didn't hurt that the professor was incredibly gorgeous. Like, shout out to Professor Goings, man. And then he had this deep radio voice. So I hang on to literally every word that he said. And truly, that's when I truly learned that. That's when I became a black woman. And that's the truth because I didn't...

I didn't know I was black until I came to this country, really, because that's not, I was Ethiopian. Everybody was Ethiopian, you know? And then I came here and I had to pick a side, you know? So that's when I was like, oh, I'm a black woman.

you know? And my Ethiopian-ness became a secondary thing. So I was a Black woman first. That's such a different way of looking at it because I've always been, you know, a Black woman, Black girl. Like that was always a part of who I am in America. You just know where you are and who you are. But it's different when you come from

a place where that is not always the paradigm or that's not always the dynamic. Yeah. And I mean, something that so many people talked about was that we were coming from places where this like salient kind of aspects of their identity or the ways of differentiating between people was so different. And then to come to a place where they were suddenly going to be like categorized

race in this particular way, just like they had to totally shift how they thought about who they were and who they were connected to and what the most important parts of their identity would be. You're listening to The Sunday Story. After the break, Leah shares more stories of Black immigrants navigating their identity in America. Stay with us.

This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

This message comes from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR to get 10% off your first month.

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Mint Mobile. From the gas pump to the grocery store, inflation is everywhere. So Mint Mobile is offering premium wireless starting at just $15 a month. To get your new phone plan for just $15, go to mintmobile.com slash switch. We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Today we're talking with NPR's Leah Dinella about her reporting on Black immigrants in Tennessee.

Well, let's dig into this idea of what it means to be Black in America, especially as an immigrant. What were some other themes that came out when people were talking about their identities and how they related to Blackness? I spoke to Vanessa Aje, who at the time was a senior at Vanderbilt University and president of the African Student Union there. A lot of African immigrants

or just like black immigrants who come to America, not only are they black, but they're also immigrants. So that adds like the double layer of like oppression onto them. And one of the things Vanessa said was that like, because of those different layers of oppression, you know, one of the ways her family dealt with that is that she was kind of encouraged to try to fit into white culture. This happens in a lot of different communities, right?

that are kind of looked at as the other, that this idea that sometimes you have to kind of hide parts of yourself to try to fit in or to try to be safe. Did that come up a lot about, you know, people talking about trying to just hide parts of themselves?

Oh, yeah. Um, yeah. And sometimes, as you said, it was like about being safe or trying to fit in. Sometimes it was just because people felt really isolated and they were like, if I make this joke or like make this reference or, you know, use these phrases or whatever, like no one is going to understand what I'm talking about. So I'm just going to kind of like hide things for that reason. Um,

And one of the other things that happened was that people just, like, had parts of –

their identities that they didn't feel comfortable sharing. There was one man I met. His name is Claude Garabuche. He told me that when he started school in the U.S. as a teenager, a lot of the friends he made didn't even know what country he was from. He said he was hiding from his story. Claude was a very recent survivor of the Rwandan genocide. When the genocide started,

Everything around him, his home, his city, Kigali, everything kind of erupted in chaos and violence. So he and his family were forced to flee the country. And they went through this incredibly traumatic journey. At one point, he mentioned the group they were traveling with got stopped at a checkpoint. We were in a pickup truck. They checked the IDs. And then afterwards, they pointed at me and my mother and took us out of the truck and ordered the truck to leave.

They separated me and my mother. They started questioning us. And a guy looked me in the eyes and says, say goodbye to life. And then they walk us away from the street to a little bamboo forest. And at the bamboo forest was a little carpentry shed. And it was raining. Water was dripping off of that roof. It was like a scene from a scary movie. There was just no music. It was the only thing missing there.

And then a group of people ran up. It was mostly women, older men, some children. I would never recognize those people if I saw them anywhere. They started yelling at these guys. And the guys look at us and they go, you see that group of people? Go talk to them. Borrow some shovels and hoes and dig your own grave because we got to bury you after we kill you. Oh my goodness. Yes.

So what happened? Eventually, the driver of the truck they'd been in kind of negotiated, convinced the people there to let Claude and his mom go.

The family eventually wound up resettling in the U.S. in Nashville. But obviously that trauma was really overwhelming. In the U.S., Claude really was struggling. He was dealing with a lot of unresolved PTSD. And he has this memory at one point early when he kind of had recently arrived of trying to explain to Claude

One of his English teachers, what he had lived through escaping the genocide, and this teacher, who was a white man, basically said, I don't think this story that you're telling is true. I haven't heard accounts like this on the news. This can't really have happened.

So, of course, in a situation like that, you are not going to want to talk about what happened to you because people aren't even believing you. And it's re-traumatizing, right? Exactly. Yeah. And then, I mean, on top of that, Claude started very quickly experiencing American-style anti-Blackness for the first time. So you're getting hit after hit after hit. Yeah. He told me about this one particularly often.

bad experience also when he was in high school. I was at a store, a Kroger grocery store, and went to use a payphone. And I know payphones are like an old thing. Nobody knows about payphones anymore, except for the movies, right? And

a bunch of cops pulled up and they slammed me against the wall and then they threw me down on, uh, on the ground and started to handcuff me. But then, um, they looked at me and they go, Oh, it's not him. And they, um, uncaught me and left. Um, so that was the early experience of, um,

of police brutality. Also during high school, Claude said he started kind of seeing and experiencing this more subtle kind of backhanded racism, often around some sort of accomplishment or academic achievement. They would tell you're different than other black people. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's really complicated though, because, you know, this idea of being set apart as black

different from other Black people, because you're an immigrant and the idea that that is a positive thing or a compliment. And I, you know, sometimes on social media, you'll kind of have these diaspora wars. You know, there's a tension between Black people born in this country and Black people that come here from other countries because, you

Black people who were born in this country will say, well, Africans or other groups may be looking down on Black Americans. Did you get into any of that? Yeah. I mean, one of the people that I spoke to, a sociologist named Christina Greer, she wrote this book, Black Ethnics, which gets into that a lot. A lot of Black immigrants are in a kind of different category than other immigrants in some ways because whereas for other immigrant groups,

Assimilation is one of the ways that you prove that you're American. You kind of fold yourself into society. It's like it has a lot of benefits, but a lot of Black immigrants...

that they will be safer, they will be treated better, and they will have different opportunities if they distinguish themselves from Black Americans. And so one of the things that Christina Greer found, which I thought was fascinating, is that a lot of Black immigrants keep names that will make them sound un-American. I'm doing air quotes around un-American, but keep names that will distinguish them as immigrants, keep their accents well-known

wear clothing or kind of have these like signifiers of being from another country because that's actually protective in a way. In some ways it can kind of insulate people from the real dangers and harms of being perceived as African-American.

Wow. So what you're saying is, if I'm getting this correctly, is that some Africans in the U.S. may make a decision that there is a benefit for them to hold on to, you know, kind of a little bit of an otherness from Black Americans because anti-Black racism is so deeply entrenched in the U.S.?

Exactly. And I should be very clear, too, that there are plenty of people who are seeing the racism that Black people experience and deciding, okay, we need to form tight community with other Black people. We need to be especially together. It's not this kind of widespread rejection of Blackness. And one of the things Christina Greer said that I thought was so interesting is that

Any immigrant coming to the U.S. learns very quickly about anti-Blackness. It's not subtle. People quickly understand that if you are categorized as a Black American, if you're put into that category, it's going to mean all of these things. It's going to have implications for the neighborhood that you live in, for the kind of jobs, job opportunities you have, for how people treat you.

And also your personal safety, right? Like being stopped by police, being victims of police brutality. People learn that really quickly. And so I heard a lot of people talk about this new kind of hostility or suspicion that they had to deal with. Multiple people I interviewed talked about being harassed by police. A lot of people talked about having an incarcerated family member arrested.

A lot of people talked about being mistreated, demeaned, talked down to at work. There was one person in particular who said that he was working as a dishwasher when he first arrived in Nashville. He didn't speak English, and his boss kept kind of shouting the same word at him over and over again. And he asked some people what that word was, and that's how he learned about the N-word. Oh, my goodness. And did he learn how to fight after that? So did he?

So, because my goodness. Oh, yeah. And I mean, I think a lot of people had kind of similar or like related experiences where people were like, oh, these people don't speak English, so I can say whatever I want to them. And yeah, there were all these instances, some of them really, really subtle, some of them really overt about people kind of learning what blackness was by being victims of racism. Right.

If you are racialized as Black, you basically just Black no matter, I mean, you are Black no matter what you do, right? Like that's the fact. But it is interesting when you come from it from a different place of learning like, or in learning to embrace that. Oh yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people I spoke to kind of talked about how at first they had this idea that if they accepted that they were Black, it kind of meant that they were

giving up their nationality their culture like that you know that that would be the only thing and then realize that no like blackness is full of all of these different things it's not like a choice it's not an either or um and I think that that happened for Vanessa in a kind of powerful way she she told me about this big festival that Vanderbilt has each year that's like a a

a celebration of African culture and there's like food and music and dancing and a fashion show. I was wearing this long red dress that my mom had sewed for me and it's funny I didn't like it and I was like oh this is this fits weird and I don't like it but then when the fashion show came up I was like I really want to do the fashion show so I'll just wear it is what it is but then when I wore it I got a lot of compliments on it and I felt really beautiful um

I think also it was definitely a point of pride for my mom to see that we were no longer hiding our African-ness. We were now embracing it and being willing to showcase that. She started to realize that she could be American and black and Nigerian and dig into all of those things.

Leah, thank you so much for talking with me today. My last question for you, I know you spoke to so many people about their struggles in this country, but I also know that in every interview, you asked a question which I absolutely love, and that's, what's your favorite thing about being Black? Yeah. Yeah.

This was my favorite part of every conversation because often, like, even when we had just spent like two hours talking about trauma and racism and all these negative things, people would be like, oh, yeah, I love being black. This is wonderful. Like, everything about it is great. And so I want you to hear some of my favorite, favorite things that people said. Oh, man. Favorite thing about being black.

I feel like black people are so beautiful. I like the way we glow in the sunlight, like us in the summer especially. Despite everything that we go through, we've still made our own culture. We created amazing music, like blues and jazz, all that came out of the oppression, and we have amazing food. Black people, we are the most loving, kind-hearted people that you will ever meet in your life.

I never met a Karen, a black Karen before. I love that about being black, the ability to go around the world and be one of the people. You know, I think of my parents, I think of my, the church community, I think of communities across history and...

all of the stuff that we've been through. And yet there's so much joy. There's so much hope that still exists. There's so much creativity in some ways. Like, I mean, I would say that the dreams of black people keep this world going. That was Code Switch senior editor, Leah Dinella. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Aisha. This was really great to talk about. I appreciate the time.

This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our engineer was Josh Newell. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

Thank you.

Terms apply. Learn more at etrade.com slash NPR. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Member SIPC. E-Trade is a business of Morgan Stanley.

Hi, I'm Ramteen Arablui from ThruLine. Electricity, internet, cell service, all the things we rely on every day can be unreliable or inaccessible in an emergency. But through any storm or crisis, radio is a lifeline. Support the resource that's here for you no matter what. Give today at donate.npr.org.

All this year, NPR traveled the country, hearing from voters not just about the issues, but about their hopes for the country's future. We should be able to disagree with each other without bullying each other into submission. And what it means to be a part of a democracy. Invest in coverage that moves us forward together by giving today at donate.npr.org.