By Ebuka Uko
I arrived in the United States in the fall of 2021 to start postgraduate studies, only to find myself engaged in conversations about Blackness in ways I had never experienced in over 30 years of life in Africa.
Suddenly, I constantly faced questions that never really came up for me before. What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to belong? I have always been a global majority, and that’s all I knew.
In that wrestle, I stumbled on something James Baldwin said in 1961: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage, almost all of the time.” Reading those words, I felt exposed. It also gave me a new understanding of Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom.
