From Africa to America: How Black Identity Changes Across Borders!

The negritude movement involved Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, and Frantz Fanon among others.

Weyni Tesfai, I am a good bit older than you. During my teenage years in the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s in the United States and among many people I met in the U.S. from the Caribbean and Africa the concept of Blackness was a tool used by people of African heritage to fight racism. Black had been used by Whites as a term to denigrate people of color just like it is still used by many ignorant people in those places and South Asia. We adopted Black as a positive unifying term and rejected the terms Negro and Colored which we had used to describe ourselves in the past. As much as I enjoyed the writings of Wole Soyinka his warnings concerning Negritude missed in large part the pervasive nature of racism in places like the United States. We could not just be a tiger here or we would be killed by White racists or police. He seemed a little naive to this reality and to the negative self-image that people of African descent had been implanted with since our kidnapping, transportation, and massive murder and rape in the Americas. His philosophy was better-suited for the African continent but Frantz Famon better understood the psychology of racism in the Americas and Africa. To ignore Blackness and be a tiger seemed then and now incredibly naive.