
I, along with millions of other Africans, find it strange that African Americans think that a man whose mother was a White American and father was a Kenyan from East Africa, who grew up in Hawaii with his white grandparents, is their great Black hero. This being Barack Obama, who up till his entrance into politics did not identify as Black. I also find it staggering that a woman whose mother was born and bred in India and whose father in Jamaica is also claimed by the Black community as someone descended from slaves in America. It doesn’t make sense; it has no credibility. Just because two ambitious politicians use a label to get elected doesn’t make them what they are not: Black American.
The African American community has a terrible habit of using color in every aspect of their life. The latest example being the furor over the South African pop star Tyla, who, when asked how she identified, said she was Colored. This belongs to a community in South Africa called the Colored people, mixed-race Africans who have their own culture and way of living. Charlemagne the God, the host of the Breakfast Club, took offense that Tyla did not identify as Black, starting an unnecessary conversation about the definition of being Black in America—the one drop of Black doctrine. This slavery mentality that seems to be instilled in the mindset of African Americans is holding them back. When you watch Black TikTok, every video is “Black this, Black that,” “the white man did this, the white man did that” to us over and over again.
These days, they have taken to insulting Africans and Africa, trying to make the 1.5 billion people on the continent a subculture and inferior race. They believe that living and being born in America, where they built the country as slaves, makes them better and more superior—not like the Africans who rip them off at any given chance. They are insulting themselves when insulting Africa, a continent of 54 different countries with different skin colors and tribes, ancient customs, and thousands of different languages, who do not spend their days thinking about the color of their skin.
Divide and Rule is evident in the descendants of slaves. They are fixated on trivialities that don’t feed or house them, repeating the same storyline that keeps them stuck in run-down, segregated housing, low-end jobs, welfare, one-parent homes, and high unemployment—not to mention the largest numbers in prisons across America. Meanwhile, immigrants from Africa come to the country, see the fantastic infrastructure, the luxurious lifestyle compared to the poor situations in Africa that they come from, and say, “This is heaven, let me get angel wings and fly.” Within ten years, they have left African Americans behind economically and financially, taking full advantage of the great education that they take seriously and utilize fully, not the negative aspects of the American dream.
This negative attitude and the delusion that comes with it by claiming what is not theirs as their own—Obama and Harris being the two main examples—is not productive. The longer it continues, the hood, gangs, and prisons will continue to strangle this community. A man with a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya who graduated from Harvard is not in any way one of their own, and fighting to make it so doesn’t mean it’s right.
