How blacks made America and how America made us

When I was growing up in British Guiana, the only Englishspeaking country in South America, I didn’t understand then why nobody I learned about in school looked like me. Until one day a teacher in high school, who looked nothing like me, chose to teach a class about Toussaint L’ Overture, the great Haitian Liberator. It wasn’t in the curriculum, but it changed my life.

The swagger in my step acquired new meaning in a society stratified along lines of color. I was proud just to know who Toussaint was. But who was I?

This question of identity, specifically of black identity, is at the core of the National Museum of African American History and Culture that’s opening Saturday in Washington.

I had no strong sense of my family’s history. But growing up in the intensely political environment of a country in the middle of a mass anti- colonial movement, I was radicalized early, and so identity for me was rooted in social movements. Hence my curiosity about the civil rights movement in the United States.

By the time I set foot in North America, in 1967, the movement was in its Black Power phase, when the question of identity occupied center stage. Suddenly I was surrounded by blown- out Afros, Black Power fists and handshakes, and the emphasis on the beauty of being black. All my friends from Guyana and the Caribbean were swept up in this movement. In black communities, interest in Africa and the diaspora was high. An unspoken bond grew among black people greeting one another in public places. We refused to be referred to as colored or Negro. We were black. That was it.

Here I was, a black man from the Caribbean, who had found a home in Washington, with all my children born here, and a wife from Birmingham, Ala., even as the term African American crept into and then dominated the lexicon, more accurately tracing the roots of the black population formerly enslaved here, and affirming its American presence.

So who am I now? A black South American Caribbean West Indian African American Washingtonian? No. I am a black person in America. And that can be a very complicated thing, regardless of your country of origin, or the country of origin of your parents, or the state you come from, or the city you live in.

I live in Washington. I bear a tattoo of the District of Columbia flag on my forearm, as an indication of my affection for this city, and as a protest against the city’s lack of statehood and voting rights in Congress. In one respect, I’ve come a long way. In another, I’m back in an anti- colonial movement, with a long way to go.

And that’s what the new museum will hopefully teach all of us about black people and about America. It’s all about a journey. About the people who traveled that perilous journey, their highs and their lows, their struggles and their victories, how they made America, how America made them. About how they’ve come a long way — and why there’s still a long way to go.