Your black card has been revoked!
Since I made that first trek across town to a white private high school, my mother and I have had this inside joke about moments of having your black card revoked.
On Saturday night my black card was revoked. It was an ambush of sorts. I can usually see it coming. I was having such a good time, chilling, dancing and all that jazz with some Johannesburg folks. This guy who I kept running into all nights takes a seat next to me and begins the usual “where are you from?” interrogation. “From the states…California…the west coast…the Bay Area,” I responded with the hope that I could escape what was about to become a hostile hour-long conversation. The diatribe is too long to rearticulate here, but here is the jest: I am not African, Black or African-American; I am just American and need to stop looking for something to anchor my “confused” self to and accept that I am American. Damn. I have never identified as American—in fact at age 9 I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance and later in my life I decided that I will say I am American when I am treated like a full citizen. I have no American card, and my black card was revoked. Kameelah has no cards, so I guess I float ambiguously.
Reasons why gatekeeper (let’s call him Sipho) revoked my black card: my skin is too light and I look Colored not Black; my name is not indigenous like his; I do not speak an indigenous African language; my hair, which he could not see because of hijab, but still was able to discern, isn’t the right texture; I have no culture; and implicit in this discussion was the fact that as a Muslim I did not have an indigenous religion. After seeing how heated I was after I read him the riot act about his assumed monopoly on blackness, he attempted to renege on this discursive looting of my identity, claiming instead that he was only “joking.” All jokes aside, I think Black folks have found themselves trapped in the never-ending Olympics of identity politics, homeland claims and hollow gospels of pan-Africanism. While my personal experiences here in South Africa cannot be generalized for the whole of Black American-African relations, it has provided valuable insight and instigated a few questions. Is pan-Africanism and a recognition of common forms of capitalist exploitation that bind black folks globally a reality or just hollow gospel? If it is just a hollow gospel, how can we mobilize this hollow gospel from a dream (if this is what we all want?) to an irresistible reality? Do black folks throughout the diaspora need to work harder to find our commonalities (without homogenizing our nuanced differences and experiences+history) rather than harping on differences that at least in my opinion weaken us a formidable political force? And furthermore, who owns blackness? Who has a right to define who qualifies for a Black card and who has to reapply? I am for sure tired of reapplying and submitting supporting documentation of my blackness.
Published on December 4, 2006 at 4:47 am.
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Filed under black culture, diaspora, history.
