Two black gays on one black gay videos
When the white attendant at the drugstore in Harvard Square trailed behind me after I scanned a shelf of high-end cosmetics, I imagine she saw a Black man obviously up to no good. I expected better here.Īnd of course, law enforcement officers aren’t the only Americans who believe in racist stereotypes. Also (and most important), America prides itself on being a global defender of human rights Nigeria’s track record in that regard is merely modest when not abysmal. The difference is that at home, police brutality is not set off by racist stereotypes. There are serious problems with policing in Nigeria as well - recent activism has brought the extreme abuse that occurs there to the world’s attention. Instead, what they saw were just two Black men who were speeding either to or away from crime. The cops who threw me against the car and patted me down during my second week in the United States almost certainly weren’t thinking the Black men they saw driving along the interstate could be lovers trying to maximize the warm lights of a waning summer day. I thought: Surely, my masculinity, considered too tenuous and inadequate in Nigeria because of my sexual orientation, cannot be considered threatening in America.īut here in America, masculinity added to melanin multiplies into something monstrous - in the white imagination, that is. I thought: If there is any justice in this world, I’d be spared the fraught realities of another marginalized existence. Not because it offered any immunity against racism, but because I still have on my body the fresh wounds I suffered on the front lines of L.G.B.T.Q.
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The glory of America is global, and so is the struggle of its Black citizens.Īnd yet, somehow, I managed to believe that my queer identity would protect me.
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You can’t idolize Barack Obama and not shudder at the tragic murder of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. is often read side by side with the story of Eric Garner. Growing up on the other side of the Atlantic, I was well aware that in America, Black masculinity is pathologized and the Black presence relentlessly policed.
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I’ve traded one perilous identity - being gay in Nigeria - for yet another one: being a Black man in America. But this spring after videos of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd surfaced, I’m coming to terms with the fact that the country that promised me safety is one where Black men like me face a different kind of danger.Įach time I tell someone why I’m here, the sad irony of it hurts like a gut punch. After I was kidnapped and tortured in Nigeria for being gay and daring to speak openly about it America offered me refuge. I came to the United States in 2019 as a scholar-at-risk fellow at Harvard University.