Guest Blog! On Black Erasure

** DISCLAIMER: This is a guest blog post and is not endorsed, represented or necessarily aligned with the views of Catherine Scott. This post represents the views of Jacq Applebee  ONLY **

We Were Never Here

I’ve been called a fake Black person for most of my life.

As a child, it was because I liked rock music instead of reggae or R'n'B. Later, it was because I fell in love with white people of different genders. It has taken a long time to truly understand why this name-calling hurts so much, even as an adult.

If you look at most popular media, Black people apparently only live in America in the present day. Black folks exist as slaves on TV and in films, disappear for a few hundred years and then magically come into being once more in the 1970s. We don't get to exist as anything else in history, and we’ve been mysteriously wiped out in the fictional future...

Think of the Black people who are celebrated during Black History Month UK, or the few that pop up during LGBT History Month. With the exception of Nelson Mandela, pretty much everyone is viewed as or labelled African American--and Mandela himself has often been erroneously referred to as African-American!

This doesn’t only happen during October and February. All year round, all around the globe, there is an assumption that Black = African American only. Figures such as Marcus Garvey, Mary Seacole and Bob Marley are rarely, if ever seen. There are many internet rumours (albeit difficult to verify) of Kriss Akabusi, Idris Elba, and other non-U.S celebrities being mistakenly described as African-American whenever they're in the news for doing something positive.

British athlete Kriss Akabusi, Credit Brian Minkoff, 2012, via Creative Commons

Sadly, it is common that both White people and African American people perpetuate this way of thinking; ignoring the diversity of Black people around the world to focus solely on a single group. This affects our lives from the trivial to the vitally important. When I see tweets about the high numbers of trans women of colour murdered every year, the only cases I hear about are those in the U.S, even though places such as Brazil and Mexico actually have many more incidents. Black people also exist in Central and South America; some seem to forget that you can be Latinx AND Black!

So what does this all mean for Black people who are not African American? 

It means erasure. 

It means a British university supervisor telling their Black staff not to complain about racism. 

It means ME having to take the minutes of that meeting, and having to hide my disgust, while a white person says “What you’re going through isn’t so bad — it’s not America in the 50s. Nobody’s trying to lynch you.” 

It means a Parisian cab driver pointing at me and saying“You are American. I hate Americans!” while believing without question that my white fellow travellers were British.

It means that when I asked if there would be Black speakers at a Fat Liberation event in London. I was told “We tried to get a speaker from America, but she cancelled.” Not once did it occur to the organisers to contact a Black speaker from the UK. 

It means that whenever I write about Black people in the UK in fiction or non-fiction, I can pretty much guarantee that I'm going to have to explain to the editor that WE EXIST HERE TOO!

We are written out of history.
We were never here.

London-based feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge. Stylist Magazine cover, May 2017

When white people and Black Americans only recognise one group as "Proper Black People," it adds yet another barrier to the ones people of colour already face. It erases diversity and replaces it with a one-size-fits-all model where we are all supposed to have the same influences, culture and ways of communication. Those of us who don’t fit the mould are rendered invisible.

I have had too many experiences where African Americans are assumed to be the authorities on how issues affect Black people as a whole. This kind of behaviour goes beyond who we see on television and in the movies: it affects the daily lives of Black people around the world.

Black people live all over the world. Our lives matter, yet are regularly disregarded; justice for us is often withheld, and therefore how we spend our leisure time is key.
We want to see our own reflections and not only of those who are African American.
We don’t want to have to create everything ourselves in a bid to not be erased.
People of all ethnicities must do the work to make this happen.

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Jacq Applebee is a Black, fat, bisexual activist and writer. They are a co-founder of the support group Bis of Colour. Jacq has a crowdfunder to help them attend a bisexual conference overseas; you can support it here.