Becoming black

by Ahmed Adam

Each Saturday, I walk hand in hand with my three-year-old daughter down Todd Street Mall. The supposed spine of the town, the Mall exposes the town’s many contradictions. Bookended by a church and a racially segregated pub, the Mall seems to both refuse no one but also offers so little in the way of a sense of belonging to anyone. Empty shopfronts and art galleries of varying ethical standards, face off against a gathering of Aboriginal women selling their intricate paintings to passing tourists on the well-watered grass.

Hand in hand, our regular route takes my daughter and I to visit the Bakery, then to the playground, and after that to the town pool for her weekly lesson. The well-trod path of ours has given me cause to reflect on what will remain in her memories from these walks as she ages.

Considering the possibility of her memories has allowed me to revisit parallel moments in my own childhood. 

I still remember at age five, going with my father for the first time to Khartoum Stadium to watch a football match between the two biggest soccer teams in Sudan. It was a hot summer evening, the air alive with heat, dust and the sounds of the call to prayer. Throngs of people, mainly men in their white jalabiyas, a loose-fitting traditional garment, and others wearing trousers and shirts filled the noisy stadium. It was the first time I’d seen such masses of people in one place. Outside the stadium a whole market had been established around the game with stalls selling roasted peanuts, sugary sesame snacks and sickly sweet lemon drinks. 

The match started and somehow I found my heart went to the team in blue and white. Although we lost the match that team became my life-long favourite and blue my favourite colour. Decades later I still wake up at 3am to catch games broadcast over Facebook or YouTube.

With my mother, I remember holding her hand while walking in Khartoum on our way to the doctor. During the walk from the bus station my first case of Malaria began to worsen. I clutched my mother’s hand wearingly. Despite my developing sickness, I remember spotting graffiti on one wall - text inscribed in paint declaring opposition to the dictator who was ruling the country at the time. It was a revelation to my child self to see this daring act of resistance, as my mother pulled me away, I was aware of the risk to the life of those who would have written it. Risky and fleeting, the graffiti was likely to be erased by government authorities within hours of being written.

On a recent Saturday walk, my daughter and I bumped into an acquaintance who I had last seen when she left town four years ago pregnant with her first child. Her son, just older than my daughter, exchanged meek introductory glances, as we decided to catch up over a coffee at a nearby café. Just a moment after we sat down in the cafe her son, who had been silent up until this point, said his first words while he was looking at my daughter. As if delivering a line in a play, he offered the words, ‘I don’t like black kids.’

I sat there in stunned silence, shocked that a four year old could express such thoughts. His mother remained silent, her expression conveying embarrassment, silent awkwardness, avoiding eye contact.

My immediate thoughts went to how a child so young generates and expresses such thoughts. Is it a matter of mirroring? But who is he mirroring? A xenophobic grandparent? Older children in the playground? The quiet thoughts of his mother whom I thought a friend? Society at large? What is blackness and how has he come to understand, recognise it and form these negative associations with it?

As Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe explores, blackness is a product of capitalism. Capitalism is 

‘an economic system, an apparatus of capture, a regime of signs. But it must also be understood as a certain kind of compulsion…the compulsion to put things in order as a precondition for extracting their inner value. It is a compulsion to categorize, to separate, to measure and to name, to classify and to establish equivalences between things…’ (1)

Growing up in Sudan where the majority of people are dark skinned, blackness is not a signifier. It is a society built around different rules. Social structures are defined by ethnicity, ethnic differences are used by the ruling class to maintain power. When I moved to Egypt I encountered a society shaped around religion.

I became black after arriving in Australia. Not uncommon for the African diaspora, we come to understand ourselves as black through the definitions and social categorisation we are burdened with. I learned from experience that to be black means you are likely to be categorised as a victim, or a thug, or a noble savage. I understand identity as a becoming, not as an already made category. It is something you never arrive at, it is an ongoing unravelling. Black, with a capital letter, is misleading. Black is always a becoming, becoming black.

For my daughter, born into a racialised society, she arrived black in the eyes of others. It is likely that her plight will be defined by her resistance against this imposed identity. As Chelsea Watego put it in her insightful book Another Day in the Colony,  

‘My interest in race is not a matter of intellectual curiosity. I have no desire to possess the most sophisticated articulation of it. I am a blackfulla with something to say about it, for race has always had a place in my life, especially in my resistance against it.’ (2)

For Stan Grant, ‘the Australian dream is rooted in racism…It is there at the birth of the nation’,(3) just like it is at the birth of a child in this country.

I looked again at his mother waiting for any response, a correction or redirection offered to her child. Silence. The youngest person at the table, the ‘black kid’ broke the silence. 

With a smile she gladly responded, ‘I don’t like white kids.’

A big act of resistance for a small child, words not fully understood, yet their defiant nature clear. Words so easily erased, like the graffiti fleetingly witnessed in my own childhood. Minimised by an uncomfortable laugh and faded against a backdrop of systemic racism, her words both a clap back and also a sign of what she is to face in the decades ahead and how it will shape her. 

1.      Goldberg, David Theo. "‘The Reason of Unreason’: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg in conversation about Critique of Black Reason." Theory, Culture & Society 35.7-8 (2018): 2.

2.    Watego, Chelsea. Another day in the colony. University of Queensland Press, 2021:105.

3.    Grant, Stan. "IQ2 Racism Debate: Stan Grant." Racism is destroying the Australian dream (2016). YouTube, uploaded by The Ethics Centre, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEOssW1rw0I&t=337s

This piece was edited by Gary Paramanthan and was presented in partnership with Watch This Space.