You Do Not Understand.

Being black in Nigeria and being black in America are two different things, and in some way, I have experienced both. In Nigeria, I didn’t really know I was black, it only occurred to me that I was something different when I watched movies or saw the occasional Lebanese man in the state I grew up in. Even then, they were other, not me. I was the norm, and anything apart from me was weird. This is not to say that I had not been taunted for the colour of my skin before, but those taunts were not from white people instilling in me their superiority, but from colourist people, who had been taught that lighter was more beautiful. This post however, is not an expose on that particular brand of ignorance.

I first knew I was black when I started taking the public bus in Georgia, not to be confused with when I arrived in Georgia. You see, I lived in a predominantly black neighbourhood, and attended a predominantly Nigerian church, therefore, I was very insulated from the realities of my skin colour until I got on the bus.

My second bus trip, I was left behind by the bus driver, a white middle-aged man who watched me run after the bus while it was still in the park and ignored me. He also ignored the protests of some of the occupants of the bus who knew I had already paid the fare, and saw me step off for one minute to get a coke. I blamed myself for that incident, not the driver, at least not until I rode in his bus again and watched him stop for a white man who missed the bus by a minute.

On bus “75”, I always sat alone. I watched people get on the bus and avoid the section I was sitting in completely, choosing instead to stand, or squeeze into other sections. If you must know, these other people were not black. I never got a smile from anyone, or a response to my hellos, unless there was another black person on the bus. Unfortunately for me, at that time of the morning, there were hardly any other black people on the bus.

I remember when my father gave me “the talk”.

He said to me, “always keep your driver’s license in an open, easily visible place. If you are stopped by the Police, be polite, do not argue. If you have to reach for a document, speak clearly, tell them, ‘I am reaching for my license’. Do not put yourself in trouble”. I had not really thought about these things before. I had not considered that I was more likely to be assaulted or murdered by a police officer than a white person, and that my brother was in even greater danger than I was. I had to finally come to grips with the fact that in America, I was first black, before human.

I am back in Nigeria, and reading the news about George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery from my room. I am sad. I don’t know how to react to the fact that a black person can die for just existing and doing human things like jogging and buying groceries.

What I do know, dear fellow average Nigerian, is that you don’t understand. I know you think you understand, and you want to tell them, “next time don’t run, don’t resist arrest, don’t do this or that”, but that advice comes from a mind that cannot comprehend what it is to be black in a place that is predominantly not, a place that is systemically set up to oppress you for the sole reason that you are black.

You can be sad, you can mourn with those that mourn, but what you should not do is go on twitter and argue with African American people about what they should do next time to ensure that they don’t die.

You don’t understand. You don’t.