From Biafra to police brutality: challenging localized Blackness toward globally racialized ethnicities of Nigerians in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

This article reveals how Nigerians in the U.S. negotiate their multiple forms of Black racialization. They incorporate both local and global social scripts within their intersected subjectivities as part of the following communities: Black American, Black immigrant, and post-independence Black African (Nigerian). I use a historically-informed ethnography of Nigerian middle-class communities in Houston, Texas to convey the distinct but overlapping sociohistorical realities that makeup definitions of Blackness for my interlocutors. I argue that Nigerians in Houston, Texas embody global intersecting modalities of Blackness where race and ethnicity are interconnected, existing within a global frame, and grounded in contemporary Nigeria. I demonstrate how “localized Blackness” as a politics of solidarity confines race and Blackness to the U.S., which limits post-independence Nigerians’ racialized reality. This article moves from police brutality to U.S. anti-Black immigration laws and the Nigeria-Biafra war (genocide) to help us think about racialization globally and across time and space.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• Nigeria
• race
• ethnicity
• solidarity
• African immigrants

Acknowledgements

A special thank you goes to my interlocutors for entrusting their intricate realities to me. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at UVa for their generous feedback on a previous draft of this paper. I especially want to thank Delali Kumavie, Pablo López Oro, Halimat Somotan and the anonymous referees for providing constructive and encouraging feedback on various drafts. Lastly, I thank Jemima Pierre and Vilna Bashi Treitler for providing the intellectual guidance that has made this project possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use post-independence Black African (PI) to assert that the majority of contemporary Black Africans in the U.S. came after formal colonization ended (and multilateral racial imperialism began) in most African countries. Further, post-independence is used to critique African countries “independence” and place PI Black Africans within a globally racialized imperial reality (Pierre 2013). Gordon (1997, 3) rightly articulates, “ … it is far more comforting to advance our age as ‘postcolonial’ although power relations worldwide continue to support colonial realities.”

2 Official names of organizations and people have been replaced with pseudonyms for confidentiality.

3 For a more detailed account of the Nigeria-Biafra War (genocide), see Achebe 2012; Korieh 2012; Korieh and Ezeanu 2010; Offodile 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Warfield Center of African and African American Studies, University of Texas at Austin; P.E.O. International; Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia; The Sociology Department, Wesleyan University.