“It’s 2025. You are not African American, you are an American.”
That was the objection a reader raised against me recently. He wanted me to drop the adjective, to assimilate fully into the generic noun. When I asked if he demanded this same assimilation from Chinese Americans or Irish Americans, he had no answer. But his comment sparked a fire in me. It made me want to define, once and for all, the specific, painful, and triumphant reality of this identity. We are not just Americans. We are something specific, forged in a specific fire. What is an African American? This is my ode to the answer.
We are the children of a paradox.
Born not of a wedding,
But of a collision.
A violent, non-consensual crash between two worlds.
The Mother: Africa. Organic. Ancient. The Root.
The Father: America. Industrial. Rigid. The Structure.
It was not a marriage; it was a crime scene.
We were conceived in the darkness of a ship’s hold
And born into a house that viewed us as property, not progeny.
A birth of stress and strife.
But listen closely to the genealogy.
Because we are the children who know the Father
Better than he knows himself.
He tried to mold us.
The Father taught the Child English to give orders;
To strip the Mother’s tongue from our mouths.
But look at the alchemy:
The Child mastered English to write The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
We took his alphabet and wrote his judgment.
The Father gave the Child a Bible to teach submission;
To point at the verse that said, “Slaves, obey.”
But the Child opened the book,
Ignored the chains, found the Book of Exodus,
And built a Theology of Liberation.
We took the Father’s religion, dipped it in the Mother’s passion,
And built the Black Church—
A government within a government,
A fortress where the Father had no authority.
For centuries, we felt the itch of a Phantom Limb.
A longing for a Mother we were told was a savage.
A woman with no history.
So we became archeologists of the self.
From Carter G. Woodson to the scholars of today,
Digging through the Father’s propaganda to find the Mother’s truth.
And the moment the Child realized: “My Mother founded civilizations,”
The moment we remembered Timbuktu and the Pyramids,
The Father’s power over our self-esteem shattered.
He could no longer claim to be the sole source of light,
Because we knew our Mother held the sun.
But even when the books were burned,
We kept her alive in his house without even knowing it.
Somatic Recognition.
It was in the non-verbal.
The way the Child laughs from the belly.
The “Call and Response” in the pews.
The seasoning of the food.
The Gullah and Geechee preserving the syntax on the coast.
We were preserving the DNA of a Queen while living in the house of a Warlord.
And the pressure?
The “stress and strife” of this existence acted as geological pressure.
It did not crush us; it crystallized us.
It created a people who are hyper-vigilant, incredibly creative, and spiritually deep.
We took the scraps of the Father’s culture
And the fragments of the Mother’s memory
And created Jazz. Blues. Rock & Roll. Soul.
Cultural exports that became more valuable than the Father’s own inventions!
Infectious Joy.
We infiltrated the Big House through the radio.
The Father’s other children—the white youth—fell in love with our rhythm.
Before the laws changed, the culture changed.
He could control the legislation, but he couldn’t control the influence.
And speaking of the law…
For centuries, he used it as a weapon.
Slave Codes. Jim Crow.
So we decided to become scholars.
Thurgood Marshall didn’t just protest;
He out-lawyered the Father.
He picked up the 14th Amendment—a contract the Father wrote—
And used it to meticulously dismantle the framework of tyranny.
We forced the Father to honor his own word.
We used Civil Disobedience to create a holy disorder,
Forcing the Father to either enforce his laws or look like a savage to the world.
We learned to survive by Code-Switching.
Speaking two languages with a linguistic agility he will never understand.
The dialect of the Mother for comfort and community.
The “Standard” dialect of the Father for business and survival.
We became the masters of duality.
And now, we stand at the crossroads.
The reunion with the Mother is awkward; she sees us as strangers.
The relationship with the Father is painful; he sees us as a reminder of his sin.
But the realization hits us like lightning:
I am not an African who lives in America.
I am a new creation.
I am the seed of Africa grown in American soil.
We did not just survive the Father’s house;
We renovated it.
We took the bricks that were thrown at us
And built a new wing of the house—
One that is more democratic, more creative, and more honest
Than the foundation the Father originally laid.
The Father is a superpower today
Largely because of the cultural and economic contributions
Of the Child he tried to disown.
So look at us.
We are the Alloy.
Forged in fire. Quenched in tears.
The Bridge between the Ancient World and the New.
The Unplanned Heir.
The African American.
