Friends vig­or­ous­ly advised me against buy­ing a house in Naperville, Ill. They could not under­stand why I, an enlight­ened, pro­gres­sive African woman, would con­sid­er tak­ing my fam­i­ly to live in a white con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can sub­urb. After all, the Hyde Park and Bronzeville neigh­bor­hoods of Chica­go, or the lib­er­al, inte­grat­ed sub­urbs of Evanston and Oak Park were places where we would ​“fit in.”

My book club friends mean well, but race in America is more complex for the minority than it is for the dominant group. I have been unable to convey to them what it means to be black.

As a black stud­ies schol­ar who has lived in the Unit­ed States for 15 years, I am not naïve about race in Amer­i­ca. My hus­band and I joke that if we had been scared of white folks, we would not have moved to the Unit­ed States. But our more seri­ous response was that excel­lent pub­lic schools should not be out of our reach because we are black.

Six years lat­er, we have nev­er regret­ted our move. We found great neigh­bors and formed life­long friend­ships with peo­ple whom I would nev­er have known in my oth­er walks of life. And the great­est les­son learned has come from the reflec­tions on race inspired by the very acute expe­ri­ence of being a black per­son in a priv­i­leged white neighborhood.

The life of a minor­i­ty is full of oppres­sive pot­holes that ​“major­i­ty folks” nev­er have to think of. We con­stant­ly pull out our race lens­es to study each dai­ly encounter in this white world, to see if there is more than meets the naked eye, to see if our per­cep­tions of race and racism are legit­i­mate. Liv­ing in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly white neigh­bor­hood, this impulse is mag­ni­fied. I’ve had lots of con­ver­sa­tions with white friends who talk about ​“post-racial Amer­i­ca” and the incred­i­ble fact that the U.S. pres­i­dent is a black man. My response: You can­not assume to know whether racism exists if you are not a racial minor­i­ty yourself.

I’ve found an anal­o­gy to explain my posi­tion: I enjoy watch­ing soc­cer. When grown men fall to the ground and roll around because they’ve been kicked in the groin, I feel like telling them to suck it up and keep play­ing. Yet all the men in my life have sworn that such an occur­rence is hor­ri­bly painful. I will nev­er know what being kicked in the groin feels like because I’m not a man. I just accept and respect their per­spec­tive because they know how it feels. In the same way, a white per­son will nev­er real­ly know what the per­cep­tions of race are from my end of the col­or spectrum.

Book club ladies

On the one occa­sion when I could not attend my month­ly book club meet­ing, my white friends argued about the selec­tion of a new book for the next month. Some­one pro­posed The Help, a nov­el about black maids in the South who worked for white women dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. My clos­est friend in the book club object­ed to this sug­ges­tion because I, the only black mem­ber of the club, might feel uncom­fort­able read­ing and dis­cussing this book. The oth­er ladies insist­ed that I would be fine with it because this book was not about blacks like me. They rea­soned that I am African, not African- Amer­i­can, so I should have the nec­es­sary dis­tance to sim­ply enjoy the book as good fiction.

On the one hand, I was hap­py to know that their five-year asso­ci­a­tion with me had sen­si­tized these women to the fact that black folks are not a homo­ge­neous clump of human­i­ty. It’s good that they have reached a stage where they can afford me the priv­i­lege of a nuanced black iden­ti­ty. But there is an irony here. In rush­ing to appear racial­ly astute, they lost sight of the obvi­ous: I may be ​“African,” but in this coun­try I am still ​“black.” This is Amer­i­ca, where skin col­or is still the imme­di­ate sig­ni­fi­er of race, a fact that pre­vents a col­lec­tive intel­lec­tu­al shift toward a more thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of eth­nic­i­ty and sub-cul­tur­al significance.

I had to learn this when I first moved to the Unit­ed States. Grow­ing up in Nige­ria, even though it was a colony of Britain where white pow­er was a giv­en, there were enough of us that we were not pre­oc­cu­pied with the com­plex­i­ties of black­ness. Instead, we thought more about the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of our own var­ied eth­nic­i­ties. In the Unit­ed States, we ​“Con­ti­nen­tial Africans” have learned that being black requires a very dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of how that iden­ti­ty relates with white­ness. So, I would respond to a book club dis­cus­sion of The Help that focused on hier­ar­chi­cal white-black rela­tion­ships from both my posi­tion as a black in the Unit­ed States and as an African.

My book club friends meant well, but race in Amer­i­ca is much more com­plex for the minor­i­ty than it is for the dom­i­nant group. Over the last five years, I have been unable to con­vey to them the essence of what it means to be black.

Grow­ing up with nap­py hair

As for my chil­dren, they’ve thrived in school and have won­der­ful friends. I cringed when I saw their white friends con­stant­ly touch their hair in a mix­ture of won­der and con­fu­sion. But I chuck­led when my 8‑year-old son announced that like his best friend, he would be grow­ing out his hair to donate to kids with can­cer. I explained that he would have to think of a dif­fer­ent way to con­tribute because even if he escaped future hair­cuts, he would nev­er achieve what his blond bud­dy would be able to accomplish.

Oth­er episodes are not so harm­less. My 11-year-old daugh­ter and her best friend (who is bira­cial) worked very hard to pre­pare for the audi­tions for the school play–Beau­ty & the Beast. After the cast list was pub­lished and they (and the few oth­er black hope­fuls) were giv­en the anony­mous roles of dusters and brooms, I over­heard them lament­ing that they were not giv­en a speak­ing role because they were black. As I mulled over an appro­pri­ate response, I real­ized that even if all the white kids were indeed bet­ter than all the black kids who audi­tioned, that would not pre­vent this per­cep­tion from tak­ing root. I heard the same reac­tion from oth­er black par­ents who have lived in Naperville for years. They said that most of the few black kids in the school have stopped audi­tion­ing. In spite of the per­cep­tion of racism, my daugh­ter and her friend decid­ed that they would be the best dusters ever – and their smiles were wider than Belle’s when she found out that the beast was a prince.

For my chil­dren, as it is for me, the con­cept of black­ness is pro­found and com­plex. Like oth­er black kids who are per­ceived as atyp­i­cal, my kids are often shunned by their African Amer­i­can class­mates who nav­i­gate the world as a tight group and are dis­mis­sive of black kids who don’t quite fit the pro­file, i.e. their hair is too nat­ur­al, their friends are too white and their Eng­lish too prop­er. So my kids have to find their own path some­where in the mid­dle – cer­tain­ly not white, yet not com­plete­ly ​“black.” My hus­band and I have always resist­ed hand­ing our chil­dren those race lens­es I men­tioned ear­li­er, but each of them, indi­vid­u­al­ly, seems to be find­ing the way to his or her own lenses.

As we pack up our house for a move to Colum­bia, Mo., a lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty town in the buck­le of the Bible Belt, I am glad we did not hear­ken to the voic­es of rea­son and stay away from Naperville. Here we are so clear­ly ​“the oth­er” that it forced us to be proud of who we are – Con­ti­nen­tal Africans and black folks. Naperville also taught us how white hege­mo­ny works in ​“post-racial” Amer­i­ca, where per­cep­tions of dis­crim­i­na­tion and real­i­ties of racism remain woven into the fab­ric of our dai­ly existence.