Are Somalis Black? - A comprehensive look at the controversial question
This topic has become a bit like coronavirus, just when you think it’s dying down you get hit with another wave. And now, you feel like Boris Johnson, frantically mumbling an incoherent, contradictory explanation for the 50th time this month. But you know what? It can actually be confusing! So, I’ve decided to write up a little something you can conveniently copy and paste the link to, every time somebody asks you this question: Are Somalis Black?
Blackness
We should first start off by defining blackness. After all, if it means different things to different people they’ll likely never agree right? Is it down to skin colour? Is it a political categorisation? Or is it in fact cultural? Many would likely agree there are multiple factors contributing to whether or not someone is categorised as Black. However, I reckon the majority of those same people (including myself) struggle to establish the outer edges and hard borders of Blackness. Our dark skinned brethren are everywhere - you can find people in India, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea and even Turkey who are darker than most yet often not included in the black identity. African descent may be a slightly more comprehensive criteria, however that doesn’t account for many North Africans who are often not considered Black. Political marginalisation is another factor often taken into consideration when it comes to blackness as an identity. I think we can all agree on the fact it’s likely a combination of these things in the contemporary world. However, to get a better understanding of it all we need to take a look at the origins of the term itself.
A (highly oversimplified) history of…
I know I’m taking the scenic route, but bare with me here I promise I’m getting to the point.
The idea of a person being black first started as you can probably imagine - a word used to describe darker skinned individuals, mostly hailing from Africa. The Arabs, Europeans and the rest of the world alike would describe darker people as ‘black’. It’s important to note this is subjective to the region too, as some may consider darker people in their own non-black nations as black too. But, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll go with black as a categorisation based on appearance.
Later, Europeans, many of whom were repeatedly getting their backsides handed to them by North African moors, began equating black with evil, in what I can only assume to be a coping mechanism. They used biblical metaphors of black, fictional stories and pseudo science to explain away their repeated defeat at the hands of these black Africans - they must be non human evil beings! Eventually, the biblical story of the Curse of Ham made its way to the mainstream of European thinkers, outlining that in the beginning of the origins of man, there were three siblings with three different colours and races - caucasoid, mongoloid and negroid, or black white and yellow. The curse of Ham was placed on the black son, Ham, who did something reprehensible to his father. It’s important to note this story isn’t included in the Islamic narrative. After this, him and his black descendants were cursed forever to be subservient to their brothers. Now, if you take this story and add a couple of other things to the mix, like the invention of gunpowder and globalisation, you get a very easy to swallow incentive for mass slavery.
The transatlantic slave trade comes next in this twisted chain of events.Millions of black Africans were taken from their native lands and transported in chains to the Americas and forced to work on plantations. This led to isolated spheres of black people in the world - those who still live in Africa, and those forcibly moved to the Americas. For black people in Africa, a unified black identity didn’t exist then, and it doesn’t exist now. A Ghanaian is a Ghanaian, a Somali is Somali, and a Nigerian is a Nigerian (in fact even this is likely an oversimplification stemming from colonialism - just ask any Ajuran, Ashanti or Hausa person). Just as Europeans and Asians don’t all flock together under a unified banner of white/yellow/brownness, Africans didn’t either.
The situation in the Americas, and specifically north america, is slightly different. Hundreds of years have passed since the trans atlantic slave trade, and the scars of that are still very much visible today. Many can’t trace back their origins. More still have no idea who their great great grandparents were. Many don’t even know which country they were originally taken from. Not only can they not identify as Ghanaians, they can hardly even identify as Africans!
References to their very being was in fact dehumanising for a very long time. First, they were called Niggers, a vulgar and disgusting word that still leaves a deep wound for many. Then, they were referred to as the Negro, a word with the same racial hatred associated with it. Even today, there is still an incredible amount of contention on what to call black people in America, specifically the descendants of the Africans who fell victim to the transatlantic slave trade. Are they African Americans, Coloured folk, or are they *Capital B* Black people? Whilst some see the label of African American as honouring their African heritage that was stripped away from them forcibly, many argue that it implies they are African rather than American. White Americans don’t have a prerequisite to their Americanness, such as European American, and they actually made a choice to be there in the first place, so why should Black Americans be subjected to that? The world is a melting pot of peoples and identities who move from place to place.
In fact, many say using the term African American when referring to Black Americans means they are indistinguishable from Africans who migrated to America. For these reasons, many Black Americans have chosen to be referred to as Black people. Some more recently have even adopted the initialisation ADOS (American Descendants Of Slavery). I believe the rest of the African diaspora living in America should do their utmost to respect and acknowledge the unique history, culture and identity of Black Americans.
Where does this leave us UK folk?
In the last century or so, ’Black people’ was used to refer to either (Capital B)lack Americans, or it was used by non-black (and some black) people, to refer to ‘black’ people as a whole. The same ignorance that leads people to say they want to go to ‘Africa’ on their gap year has them also grouping many different groups together into one. Where in this ‘Africa’ that is three times the size of Europe are you going lad? This, in turn, has led to political and social repercussions. People with black skin are discriminated against worldwide because of artificially created shared negative attributes, first propagated by the slavers to morally justify slavery, and continuously used to uphold structurally racist frameworks. Laziness. Dishonesty. Aggressiveness. Amongst other bigoted ideas. This is further exacerbated by American media that the rest of the world consumes, where black men and women are routinely painted in the aforementioned ways.Of course that isn’t to say we should be making a distinction between black Africans, and African Americans in order to distance ourselves from these allegations. It’s simply the product of the world we live in.
In the UK, this means black people as a whole, although hailing from different regions, saw benefit in banding together to fight against the structural and institutional racism. This has also now led to a cultural unity across black people in the UK. Many different cultures and influences mixing together to create a unique melting pot of African Carribean and even Asian cultures, bleeding out into clothing, music, media and comedy.
So, this begs the question how does this apply to the UK? And specifically, where do Somalis fit in? In the UK, our brand of blackness is essentially a political union with other black people hailing from all around the world. However, there is a distinct difference between operating under a political umbrella word, and using blackness as a shared identity. The former is understandable, and even logical - there is a shared means to an end. Ending stereotyping, police brutality and discrimination in the work place is in the interest of every ethnic minority residing in this country.
There is also ‘UK Black culture’, something relatively new and not very defined compared to our American cousins. It’s a blend of many different ethnicities grouped together in inner city areas, forming a shared cultural sphere of understanding which eventually expanded to the rest of the country. In a few hundred years, we may see the homogenisation of black people in the UK to becoming Black People in the UK. At the moment, however, that’s a dubious claim at best. Polish, Lithuanian, Albanian and French people in the UK don’t flock together under the same banner, particularly when they’re all first or second generation immigrants. Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis likewise don’t identify the same. The need for a political alliance that is based on how others see you shouldn’t mean the erasure of your own identity to conform with how ‘the oppressor’ sees you. Arguments like ‘the police won’t see you any differently’ are essentially implying you should define yourself as others define you. Because Officer Jones makes no distinction between the joy he feels when he arrests a Frank, a Fumnbi and a Faarax, they should also make no distinction between each other’s identities. This fundamentally comes from a place of disrespect. Many have no desire to learn about the nuance and differences between one who is Kenyan and one who is Congolese, one who is Jamaican and another who’s St Lucian. Even in isolation from the colonial practice of dividing nations on a whim, of enslaving the accursed descendants of Ham, it is indicative of a superiority complex to essentially say ‘you guys are all the same. I see no value in distinguishing you’.
In addition to this, Somalis in many ways are on the outer borders of what is *culturally* considered ‘Black’ in the UK. Ladies wearing colourful jilbaabs started appearing in the early 90s, seldom carrying with them anything western. Language, culture, food and sometimes even religion is absolutely alien to many white and black people in the UK alike. Naturally the (mostly) anglophone West African and Carribean diasporas will find it difficult to relate to Somalis, and the same can be said on the other side. So, where does the truth actually lie?
Somalis are black in terms of skin colour. We can all agree on that much. However, the idea that there is a shared cultural assimilation into other Black people seems to be the point of contention in the UK. Many say that Somalis don’t consider themselves Black, because they are arrogant - they’re anti-black and feel like they’re above other Black people. Others insist Somalis do consider themselves, and are in fact, black! The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. For a group to be part of a cultural identity, there needs to be mutual agreement between both parties. Many will remember when Somalis first moved to the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, there was no such thing as cultural unity. These strange people who all come from a country they’ve only heard of on the news, who have their women marauding around in colourful jilbaabs with a flock of children trailing behind was an alienating sight for many. As the UK black population grew, this rift has grown in some parts of the country, and shrinked in others. In places where this rift has grown, one could argue it is natural, or at the very least understandable, for them to refrain from homoginising themselves with groups they consider hostile. And in others, increasingly so in the younger generation, homoginisation is seen as the logical, natural and correct thing to do.
For many Somalis, blackness is a cultural identity more than it is a race. The question of whether Somalis are black or not, when looked at through this lens, is a purely subjective one based on personal experiences and opinions.
The point here is, it is not necessarily racist or self hating, nor is it ‘begging it’ to consider yourself non-black or black respectively. We all have our own experiences that shape who we are and who we become. And quite frankly, there is nothing wrong with choosing to identify as your ethnicity before your artificial race, assigned by Europeans who couldn’t be bothered to differentiate between two people with the same skin tone who live thousands of miles apart from each other. The same Europeans that will, in the same breath, violently correct you for confusing Austria and Australia, Slovakia and Slovenia, or asserting a Scotsman is English. Somalis are most certainly politically black. We share many struggles with our brothers and sisters in humanity . But we, just like every other African or African descendant country, have our own cultural identity, history, tradition and religion.
O Mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another (Sura 49, Verse 13)
