I am a 23 year old Nigerian woman, a sister, daughter, follower of Christ and an educator. Trying to navigate life and find a balance between school, work, friends and family. Growing up Nigerian there’s no room for errors or mistakes, failure is not an option so I often find myself pretending to be this person who has it all together. I’ve had conversations with friends and they’ve told me that they feel like I’m a very confident person who has my life planned out. Which is somewhat true, I don’t always feel confident but I never show it and I do have my life planned out but I’ve been working on not trying to control everything and just trust God’s plan for my life. I wish I could skip to the good part, I want to be a wife and mom and travel the world and never ever worry about money. I want the softest most pampered life and the choice to work because I want to, not because I need to. My ethnic identity has definitely influenced my views, I was raised to want the best for myself and taught that in order to have that I must work hard.

Theme 2

My first experience with race was in high school. I remember I was a 13 year old freshman and this Junior did not like me, she also happened to be my neighbor. So at school she tried intimidating me then when I would come home her family would constantly try to attack us (my mom and I). I never knew why they hated us so much, especially my mom. For context my mom is Nigerian with an accent. One day the reason for the constant harassment came out “ Go back to Africa”. Now that completely shocked me especially because they were black and although they are American they are still of African descent. I grew up in east Long Beach and it is very diverse here so I never thought that my first experience with racism would come from an African American. I have talked about this experience with my Nigerian friends, and some have said they experienced the same thing, my friends who have an accent and a native first name had it worse. I read this book titled “Post traumatic slave syndrome” in my first year of college. This book spoke on a few topics but the one that stood out to me was that slave owners would turn enslaved Africans against each other and treat the lighter skin better than darker skin people and this passed on for generations and is the reason we are still dealing with colorism today. That is how slave owners made enslaved Africans change their name and language stripping them of their identity and made them believe that being African was bad this ideology has passed down generations and has resulted in a social distance between Africans and African Americans. But I will say that over the last 6 years with the crossover of Afrobeats and Ghana extending citizenship to African Americans that gap has been closing!

Theme 3

I think someone who has a positive view of their sense of self can have a positive sense of ethnic identity. If someone has a positive view of themselves, they’re more likely to accept and embrace all parts of who they are, including their ethnic background. When your self-esteem is solid, you’re less likely to believe negative stereotypes or feel ashamed of your roots. Instead, you can take pride in your culture and heritage, and that pride becomes a part of your overall positive identity.

1. From the reading, what do you think makes the Black family unique? I think that black families are more nurturing and accepting it doesn’t matter your race we will treat you like family

2. What do you think are the strengths and challenges of the Black family? A strength of the black family is the sense of community from the church, and friends I would say that a challenge in the black family is the single parent household.

3. Black parents have to teach their child about racism and hate from an early age and this is not an easy thing to explain to a child and can be emotionally difficult.

4. Based on our reading, what a factor that I think has  impacted Black families the most since slavery is the use of physical punishment to correct a child. Spanking a child doesn’t actually make them better it only instills fear in them and distances them from their parent.

5. KINSHIP IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY on JSTOR

Imposter syndrome can affect students by making you second guess yourself and your decisions all the time. For example it can make you think you’re lucky to be at a certain University and that you should not be there even though you worked hard to get in and have good grades. If left unchecked that feeling can follow you into your career by making you not speak up and advocate for yourself because you already feel like you don’t deserve to be there anyway.

Imposter syndrome greatly affects African American women because we have to work harder than everyone else and constantly have to prove ourselves in spaces where we are underestimated and unappreciated. This causes anxiety, and feeling alone which can affect your mental health.

Being both Black and a woman you will go through racism and sexism. From other races and from your own race as well. Working in an environment where there are little to no African American women and working under one can be stressful because they feel like they had to work twice as hard to get to their position so they won’t make it easy for you so they go out of their way and become unbearable essentially doing to you what was done to them by their colleagues of other races. Black women are over sexualized as is and have always been from a young age so its no different when it comes to how men in the work treat them, which is why black women are forced to work harder so they won’t be seen as someone who got their job position because they are pretty.

Having someone who looks like you, and doesn’t feel like their job is threatened by you being there and understands your challenges, can make a huge difference in improving the workplace. It will make you feel seen and it’s good to have someone at work that you can go to and talk to about what’s going on there.

One thing that really stuck with me is realizing how common imposter syndrome is and how I didn’t realize that I sometimes have that feeling as well.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/2021-sept-microaggressions.html

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/