Isolating our community from support and attaching negative stereotypes to our ethnicity did not benefit Somalis. No one is saying to truly identify with black people and assimilate with them. We should have our own private spaces. But publicly you should’ve all just kept quiet instead of screaming I am Somali all the fucking time especially when it’s never about anything good. It put a target on our backs when we’re such a small and vulnerable community.
It’s not weak to protect yourselves. Somalis aren’t even proud of their ethnic identity since everything is about being a clown nowadays. This visibility has created more self haters than anything
You can dress this bad take as much as you want, but if you tell Somali kids they're black as a first identity, they will become more black, as in their expression and their values mirror African Americans, more so than Somali. You cannot have this on-and-off switch. By the way, the other stuff about negativity is an obsfuscation. No one here talks about acting negatively and this notion that Somalis universailly is seen as a problem is just bullshit that only lives on the internet. You should touch grass. Somalis get along with other people, be it Africans or whatever, and we find ourselves in cosmopolitan places. Life is not a twitter thread, so spare me the emotional dweeb nonsense. It gets old and repetitive, at least pretend you spent your childhood outside and not on social media bubbles.
To blend in, you have to remove what is Somali, otherwise, people will always pick you out. In that process, you change identity. That is not a reversible thing. By the way, Black is not an ethnicity. The "Black" identity in America is African American ethnic identity, and we can never be that regardless. People from Africa who are not Bantu or West African consider the black thing as most tertiary, and the overwhelming Somalis don't deny it in the streets in a social setting. But that is not an identity but more so solidarity outside our identity, which is nice but not primal to who we are. You have to learn to weigh what this means.
Whoever changes their identity to be less visible and caters to other identities over their own is a self-hater. That is the definition. You can pretend it is practical, but it is what it is. People only f*ck with weak peoples and we're not more vurnerable than others. Stop painting us as weak just because your mind is.
Besides, you're naive if your black flag-waving will have people not distinguish you as soon as negativity comes your way. They will instantly say, "She says she's black, but she is Somalian." That is the reality. I have seen this before. People who want to hate will find reasons, and we look too distinct, and are distinct. That is a fact. People can either like us for what and who we are otherwise they can f*ck off. The far majority of people, and I mean 98% are cool.
If some African homie says, we're black, I say, sure. It's not that deep because it is nothing more than convenient solidarity. It does not mean I am what they are. That does not mean we're one people other than the in-situ thing. At the end of the day, I don't play their cultural flutes, and they have never eaten camel meat. So let's get real and not make it bigger than what it is. We can come together and say we're "black" in ways that are instrumental, constructivist, and pragmatic in the West because there are commonalities in certain social conditions, but we're not the same people.
I've faced racism, and so have other African people. Are we the same people? No. Does that mean we can't work together and recognize that fighting common challenges, banding for those frontier goals, if we face challenges with the dominant cultures of the host countries? Of course not. We can, and that still does not make us one, generally. Perhaps one in that cause, in that goal, in that moment. But that itself does not define my ethnic identity. Any people that does not respect you until you assimilate with them do not respect you at all. That is why I don't rock with pan-Africanism.
Does that make me less African or hostile to other cultures? f*ck no. I probably have the most African and the most diverse friends in this forum. People on this forum who have this conversation are extremely one-track-minded. Any conversation about identity that does not come with nuance is ideology. "Oh, you don't consider yourself black, you must think you're white." I don't have time for that stupidity. I am more closer to a black person than a white person in many things in general, but an African American and a White American are in one cultural group, while I am distinct from both. They're both Western people. I am not. And what makes me closer to an African American than a White American likely has little to do with culture. We're generalizing here, I rock with cool people no matter where they are from.
At the end of the day, I am about values. If some guy is a Western liberal, we have less in common than some other person who shares more values with me. I rock with the latter more. This means if you're a Westernized liberal woman who happens to be Somali, I might rock with anybody but you. Skinfolk are not always kinfolk to me.