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OK. We're all from Africa. Most anthropologists concur: Africa is where humanity's ancestors originated. And yes, my genetics can be traced to African ancestry. But that's an incomplete picture.
On both my maternal and paternal sides, my great grandparents are full-bloodied Native Americans, and further back, French Jews. Curiously, I'm the darkest member of my family. I often joke to members of my family that I must be adopted.
When African-Americans, or brown folks from Canada or Britain, are asked by some Koreans, "Where are you from?" and the answer is given, sometimes the querying Korean may actually say, "No, Africa." It's impolite to assume and then assert someone's country of origin; it also belies the long and painful history the African Diaspora has experienced in nations across the earth.
You'd think slavery, President Obama's election (twice), W.E. B. Dubois, Malcolm X, MLK, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Jay-Z, Gloria Naylor, James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, and a host of other African-American luminaries would have telegraphed to the rest of the world there's such a thing as an American of color.
There's a lot to unpack in the naming of races and nationalities. African-Americans have been called colored, Negro, black, and much worse throughout their collective history in the United States and elsewhere. Even now, there's a debate on what to call African-Americans. I prefer "African-American" or "colored." I find the term "black" to be somewhat ridiculous: African-Americans, like all people who can trace their most immediate ancestry to said continent, are shades of brown.
Further, "black" almost always holds in it an ominous connotation in the English language: blackmail, blacklist, Black Tuesday, blackball...none of these are good.
What's more disturbing is this: the assumption that an "authentic" American, British, or Canadian person, for example, is necessarily white. The normative, representative state of Western culture must also be white. This notion holds in it great power: it negates and nullifies the many contributions, and unspeakable horrors, unique to the colored experience of all of Britain's former colonies, and beyond. (Even in places such as America, "Latino" is thought to basically mean a white person with an excellent tan. In fact, there are substantial populations with African ancestry in Latin American countries. Outside of Africa, Brazil has the largest population of African descendants than any other place on Earth).
Moreover, people need to stop imagining Africa as some monolithic desert/jungle inundated in poverty, disease, decay, and corrupt, brutal governments (although, per capita, and in aggregate, it is the poorest continent in the world). Africa is Earth's second largest and second most-populated continent; it consists of 54 countries and well over a thousand languages.
You can watch hilarious and informative videos of people of color interacting with Koreans or Chinese, for example, particularly in the realm of ethnicity and nationality. Entrepreneur and online content developer Wilkine Brutus of OogeeWoogee is an example. The arguments often expressed in these videos and essays are kind, and I mostly agree with them, up to a point.
Basically, the creators of this cultural content say to be patient and informative with native Koreans and Chinese in their cross-cultural interactions.
So, when an older Korean woman or man comes up and touches your skin and asks you of your origin (and assumes it's Africa), explain and engage the ignorance.
I think I can agree with that if we take age and context into consideration. Korea is the most wired, technologically-literate country in the world. Korea is Asia's fourth largest economy, the world's fifteenth, and globally, ranks as the ninth largest trading country. If a child makes a nationality query/assertion, most thinking people smile and inform the child otherwise.
But Korea ranks second or better in math and literature and first in problem solving international comparative assessments. Korean students and adults, save the very young and very old, should have a cursory understanding of American and world history. Koreans (and increasingly, a Chinese person) pleading complete racial, historical, and cultural ignorance borders on incredulous at this point.
Most Koreans would take offense if I assumed and then asserted they're Japanese or Chinese. I make sure to assume an Asian I encounter in America or some other Western country is from that country. I never ask the all-too-common Caucasian question: "Where are you from? No, I mean where are you‘really' from?" The question implies the Asian in question couldn't possibly be American, and isn't authentically American, but in some way foreign, other, and inferior.
African nations have long, rich histories and should be proud of it. There's nothing wrong with being from Africa, or any other continent or nation, but I'm not from Africa. If you mean where I was born, and where my family was born for many generations, it's America.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
