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My brother worried that I might not survive.īeside buying me weight lifting equipment and ensuring that I trained on it, he also got me Timberland boots and Caterpillar sandals with toothy soles and exaggerated heft. Aba, Nigeria’s most resilient commercial nerve center was notorious then for its gangs, a bloody vigilante group, and rampant street violence.
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At the end of my first week there, I came home with multiple bruises and a new name, Chinelo - an Igbo name given mostly to girls. I had just moved to the city to begin studying at a rowdy all-boys technical school.
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After haggling with the hunky middle-aged owner who spent the entire time teasing me for my “girlie” frame, he paid for two five-pound dumbbells, and we rode the bus home. One Saturday afternoon when I was 13, my brother took me to a gym equipment store in Aba, in southeastern Nigeria, to shop for weight lifting gear. My choice of clothes, shoes, my body language - all of those marked one as either a not-to-be-messed-with passer-by or a punk ripe for picking on. Fitting in, indeed surviving, forced me to re-engineer my body and learn novel ways of navigating daily life on the streets. Or put more truthfully: I was a social oddity, a threat to a raging brand of toxic masculinity. My country was no place for a teenage boy like me, who was gay and camp. As a Black man in America, that has not changed. As an openly gay man there, my boldest priority each time I stepped out of the house was to return home alive. From that and other similar encounters, I learned that can I help you? when directed to a Black man in an establishment is no more a question than a polite route to surveillance.īut I was already exhausted by the time I arrived here from Nigeria. When the white attendant at the drugstore in Harvard Square trailed behind me after I scanned a shelf of high-end cosmetics, I imagine she saw a Black man obviously up to no good. I expected better here.Īnd of course, law enforcement officers aren’t the only Americans who believe in racist stereotypes. Also (and most important), America prides itself on being a global defender of human rights Nigeria’s track record in that regard is merely modest when not abysmal. The difference is that at home, police brutality is not set off by racist stereotypes. There are serious problems with policing in Nigeria as well - recent activism has brought the extreme abuse that occurs there to the world’s attention. Instead, what they saw were just two Black men who were speeding either to or away from crime. The cops who threw me against the car and patted me down during my second week in the United States almost certainly weren’t thinking the Black men they saw driving along the interstate could be lovers trying to maximize the warm lights of a waning summer day. The glory of America is global, and so is the struggle of its Black citizens.īut here in America, masculinity added to melanin multiplies into something monstrous - in the white imagination, that is. You can’t idolize Barack Obama and not shudder at the tragic murder of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. is often read side by side with the story of Eric Garner. Growing up on the other side of the Atlantic, I was well aware that in America, Black masculinity is pathologized and the Black presence relentlessly policed.
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I’ve traded one perilous identity - being gay in Nigeria - for yet another one: being a Black man in America. But this spring after videos of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd surfaced, I’m coming to terms with the fact that the country that promised me safety is one where Black men like me face a different kind of danger.Įach time I tell someone why I’m here, the sad irony of it hurts like a gut punch. After I was kidnapped and tortured in Nigeria for being gay and daring to speak openly about it America offered me refuge. I came to the United States in 2019 as a scholar-at-risk fellow at Harvard University.