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Anthony Payton, host of the Common Ground Initiative, recently interviewed Grace Kindeke, of Manchester, who came to New Hampshire as a child from Democratic Republic of Congo. The two discussed how the African immigrant community and the American-born Black Community have traditionally interacted with each other.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Payton: Talk to me about cultural identity and what it means to you as both a first generation African as well as now, a black American, how do they intersect?
Grace Kindeke: I immigrated to the United States when I was two years old and I’m 35 years old now. I’ve lived in the United States ever since. Most of my family is back home in Democratic Republic of Congo, and my mother’s generation experienced independence from a colonial power. Congo had its independence in the sixties. My mom was like in elementary school. In Africa you are not Black. You’re whoever you are, you are your tribe, your family, your ethnic group, that’s who you identify as. When you come to the United States, you are Black, you carry with you a history of colonialism and the impact that that has had on my country and people and the African continent.
Then you combine that with the history of racism and what it means to be racialized in a country that is built on slavery.
Anthony Payton: How did those two identities intersect?
Grace Kindeke: I wish there was an easy answer. I think where I find my intersection is in seeing myself as a Black woman and being able to carry the legacy of both of those heritages, that history and seeing how they interconnect with one another, like slavery and colonialism are inextricably interlocked, but that’s not the totality of our culture and our experience. I am an African who grew up in America, who is American by culture.
I still speak my native language of Lingala. I am a child of these two cultures and bringing them together has been a healing journey more than anything, because it hasn’t been integrated for most of my life. On top of being African and Black, I’m also all of those things in a predominantly white state, growing up in predominantly white schools, not really seeing myself outside of my home.There’s one culture when I go to school and there’s a different culture when I go home. Putting all those pieces together is the story of my life as a person, as a woman, as a Black person, as an African person, as an American, as a Congolese girl, all of these things having to hold and honor.
Anthony Payton: That’s something that the people don’t get to hear much of because sometimes there’s this mistrust of each other and it’s a blessing to have a voice like yours. You also do a lot of great work in community with the American Friends Service Committee and so many other people-based initiatives and the commonalities you see that are shared in the inner cities by both the Black Americans and the African immigrants. Where do you see some of those commonalities? What do we struggle with together?
Grace Kindeke: I’m proud to be able to do the work that I do in the community, both as an advocate with an American Friends Service Committee, but also as a community organizer with MCAC, which is the Manchester Community Action Coalition. The real issues that our community is facing are a lack of stable housing, issues with getting the proper educational supports, being able to access job security, fair wages. It’s all the things that we materially need as people to live and thrive in society. We all need AC, we all need food, and we all need good jobs. We all need a stable place to live and good schools for our kids in an environment that doesn’t poison us.
As an African coming to America, you’re Black, and so you have to deal with the same racial disparities at your work that my mom and my aunties experience as healthcare workers in our healthcare system – unbelievable discrimination and retaliation and horrific working conditions alongside their African American brothers and sisters who are also in those fields. There’s so much commonality and it comes down to how state and local and municipal resources are invested in our communities.
Anthony Payton: How are those resources invested to uplift people in our communities who are low income, who are needing public assistance, who are depending on the public systems that we have?
Grace Kindeke: We all depend on these public systems in one way or another, so it’s really about how those investments are used in a systematic way. At the end of the day, we all want the best for our family, for ourselves. But when you’re Black in America, the ways that our communities get invested into is very different. We experience real disparities. Whatever everyone’s unique individual experiences are like across the board, people need the same things to survive and thrive.
Anthony Payton: There are such cultural differences and, like I mentioned earlier, a distrust between the African immigrants and the Black Americans. Your voice is unique in that you can give a dual perspective. I can bring you down to a barbecue in Brooklyn with baked Mac and Cheese and you would thrive in that environment. At the same time, you can introduce us to an African dish that we know nothing about. So what should both sides know about the other, what can bring us closer?
Grace Kindeke: Understanding how linked our histories are, and understanding the ways that we experience racism in this country. Racism in general and discrimination is linked to this connected history where our people were extracted resources from our home countries and our homelands have been continuously extracted. Our own communities are not being invested into by the structures that should be investing in them. The very fact that we’re not a homogenous group and there’s so many differences in how we express ourselves artistically, musically, culturally, and yet at the heart of it we’ll call people different things in different places.
Here we call it that sense of soul, that sense of spirit, that sense of connection to your roots. It’s not just about you, it’s about the ‘we.’ At the end of the day, we’re all human beings. We have this common history not only as a species, because we’re all one people, but we have this common history that there is that sense of ‘we’ and that we fight for freedom. We fight for life, for us, and the generations that come after us. Because we have built that sense of collectiveness off of the generations that came before us, even though we may be different, if I see you on the street I see you as a part of me and me as a part of you, even if we don’t know each other, even if we don’t necessarily get along. We are still a family, we are still a community. I think that sense of the interconnectedness of one another is something that we need to remember, and that interconnectedness doesn’t mean that we don’t honor our differences and the differences in our history and the differences in our expressions and our values, but it’s still part of that tapestry of ‘we.’
This column is part of The Common Ground Initiative which aims to highlight the diversity of our communities with stories of people the average Granite Stater might not get to see or meet, clarify misconceptions and find the threads that bind us all together as one New Hampshire community. These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.
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