Clondalkin to Cape Coast

There is a song by Johnny Clegg, a white South African, called “Jericho”. In the refrain of the song he sings that, “…we are the prisoners of the prisoners we have taken…” During a concert he explained the meaning of that line. The act of taking a prisoner makes you a jailer, regardless of what you would like to be. The interaction with the “other” elicits conditioned responses, limiting you to a certain set of behaviors. He said that without the consent of the bulk of the white populace in his country the power structure overcommitted itself to become a police state.
The idea is that the commission of certain acts or the pursuit of certain policies has consequences on a societal level as well as a personal level. Often trends in society have sociological repercussions that result in crises in individual lives; suicide, deviance, or one of the all too prevalent forms of madness. Nowhere are these personal tragedies more clearly tied to societal machinations than in the U.S.A.
When my family goes to Ghana we stop in the town of El Mina to revisit the spot where my wife and I honeymooned. Without exception I see African-American tourists in either El Mina or Cape Coast, and I often overhear them talking about “these people” in terms of what “these people” eat, how “these people” treat women, or the squalor in which “these people” seem content to live. Every time I see African-American tourists they are happy to tell anyone who will listen which creature comforts they miss and how good they will feel when they get back to Chicago, or New York, or Philadelphia, without fail. The locals call them “white men”, and the African-Americans may never find out.
The non African-American Americans that go to Ghana do not complain as much. They have gone to Africa to experience destitution and life where the masses live close to nature. They are in search of adventure, and that twinge of discomfort reminds them that they have found it; or they are in the service of their Lord and welcome the opportunity to prove their piety through worldly suffering. The African-Americans, though, are expecting to be welcomed home as brethren, and they are not. The experience of the Africans of the diaspora must be similar to the experience I had when I went to Ireland to live. European-Americans call it Third Generation Return Syndrome. The crux of the syndrome is that an ego creates its identity of self based on certain attributes that are not exclusive to the self but are rather based on attributes ascribed to a second tier group, or a group that has an identity affiliation with a parent group. When generalized others from the constituency of the parent group refuse to identify with the self as a co-possessor of the common attributes of the parent group, the subject ego is immediately thrown into a crisis of self identification, i.e., I am Irish-American because I possess strictly Irish traits, but when Irish (significant and) generalized others fail to validate my Irish traits they strip me of my adjective, rendering me American alone. This occurs with some regularity in expatriated communities and there is a recognizable structure to the responses for the ethnic group abroad. The African-American community, however, has been deprived not only of the glaringly obvious connections to the parent group, such as language, indigenous religion, and major cultural traits, but also of the nuanced connections that serve to solidify personal relationships. African-Americans have had to create an “African-American-ness” based solely on the experience of the diaspora. If African immigration were to have followed the pattern of European immigration then there would be Yoruba-Americans, Akan-Americans, and Sahelian-Americans.
The world will eventually reach a level of heterogeneity such that major population centers everywhere will present such a high level of integration that the term “diversity” will be used to express the gamut of major traits of individuals as persons, such as weight, personality preference, or rate of acceleration of development. Difficulties caused by peoples’ reactions to differences in skin color will diminish with an inversely proportional relationship to the level of integration and the frequency of interaction with groups identified as “others”. By then, though, I’ll be sitting on a tropical beach with a good book and a cold beer, secure in the propriety of my relationships and confident in the progress of racial relations; at least of the ones in my house.