In mid-September, I read on Facebook that Sean “Diddy” Combs had been arrested for alleged sexual abuse. The last I heard about Diddy was in November 2023 when Casandra Ventura filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him. Facebook Nigeria was already morphing into a space where people delighted in shaming single mothers, sexual minorities and the poor. So, I didn’t pay much attention to the newsflash about Diddy because I lacked the emotional capacity to engage with social media. 

But the voices of people around me were too loud to ignore, especially those of three middle-aged African American men I met in a café talking nervously about the consequence of Diddy’s case. Their sadness reflected on their faces and weighed down their voices. When they asked whether I had read the news, I acquiesced, then asked if they were related to the music mogul. “Which black person in America is not related to Diddy?” one of them said, his eyes darting suspiciously at me. “First, it was R Kelly. Now Diddy. Why do these men continue to give this country a reason to hate us?” When he finished talking, I said, “But white people in America commit similar crimes. No one I know associates the criminalities of individual white people to their race. Why would America punish its black population for the alleged crime of one black man?” The men looked at me with pondering eyes before they said, in sullen unanimity, “Go tell it to white people.” 

I am a black person like them, a continental African living in America. America has tolerated people like me for a long time, but what this country and its patriots cannot accept, announced by Donald Trump in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, is the savagery that has driven immigrants like me to eat the dogs and cats of white people in Springfield. Does it matter that I don’t live in Springfield, that my younger sister in Nigeria adores her four cats, that I almost adopted Siri, my friend’s dog, two months before my relocation to the US? In the face of racial paranoia, these things don’t matter. But they should. For a long time, it seemed safe to remain silent about my experience in America because, as Reni Eddo-Lodge warned, “entering into conversation with defiant white people is a frankly dangerous task” that ends with them invoking “their pre-subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety.” 

The way anger is stratified in America is dishonest. In “The Heritage Room,” Jerald Walker narrates his experience with a white colleague who accused him of displaying frightening anger and didn’t stop until she succeeded in banning him from a committee they both belonged to. Walker would go on to explain in an interview that “white anger is seen as a form of integrity, an emotional reaction rooted in principle and morality. It is also a thing wholly controllable, like a rifle in the hands of a marksman, whereas black anger is the grenade handled by a fool.” Perhaps America doesn’t regard black people as intelligent enough to entrust them with anger.  

Throughout my first six months in America, I continued to reassure myself that it was too early to start complaining about racism. But I’ve disabused myself from this notion. It’s never too early to speak up about a crime, and white supremacy is a crime. White supremacy is often the first thing that welcomes a black immigrant to America, but my experience began in Germany, at the Berlin Airport, where two white men, not much younger than me, shoved me away from a boarding queue and took my position. When I turned around to protest their action, the taller one said with an exasperated breath: “Fuck you, nigger.” The words were still rolling off his tongue when his companion whispered to him. They left immediately and never returned.  

I suppressed the thought of this incident until a year later when a student of mine came to my office, after a class discussion on the impact of war around the world, and asked me: “You said there’s violence everywhere in the world, does it also mean there’s racism everywhere?” I didn’t know how to respond, but his curiosity held me accountable, so I said: “Look around and tell me what you see.” When he left, I decided that it was time to look at myself and around me and try to make sense of my life in America. Now that I’m looking, I see that the principalities of whiteness surround me and other people of colour in this country with a force we may never fully know or describe.  

In April, I attended a meeting here in Lincoln. At the reception, every participant filled in a form and left it with the receptionist before proceeding to the hall. Almost half an hour into the meeting, the receptionist ran to me and whispered: “Hi, you made a mistake in your form. Kindly fill in a new one. Do you need any assistance?” I took the paper from her and looked at it. When I said: “This is not mine,” the expression on her face alternated between shock and embarrassment. Before I could excuse myself, she said: “Why did I even think it was yours?” To deflate the tension, I made a joke about a time I helped my five-year-old niece with her schoolwork, and she scored a zero. She subdued her laughter and walked away. Whenever I think of that moment, I remember her shock that I, the only nonwhite person in a room of twenty-five people, was not the owner of the wrongly filled form. Perhaps in her experience, people like me are not associated with intellect.  

I was invited in June to serve as a mentor to a group of young writers by the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. During the orientation, one of the students asked me, his face shimmering with curiosity, “Darlington, why were you invited to this program? Is it because you’re friends with the organisers?” I never imagined that I would be singled out in such a manner in that intellectual space. So, I looked at him and said: “Yes, friendship is my only qualification.” Why not? What else could explain the presence of someone like me in one of America’s leading writing programs? It was easy to think that this student, himself an immigrant, was questioning my qualifications because of my race. But later, when I began to read his poems and essays, I came to truly see and know him as he is: a young man struggling with the insouciant whiteness of American culture. Perhaps asking me that question was not just his way of making sense of how a person like me was admitted to the American rank, but also of reflecting on his experience as an immigrant.  

I, too, am complicit in perpetuating white superiority. I’ve caught myself once feeling disappointed that a student didn’t know something I expected he should. But this expectation of mine, when I examined it later, simply rested on the notion that he is an American who has access to white privilege. Would I have been so frustrated if the student was African? I don’t think so. Then in what world is it okay to excuse the ignorance of a black person and criticise that of a white person?   

But have I broken into the American rank, as my students think? Not when I’m constantly in the presence of white principality. Perhaps I should have ignored the white man who stopped me on the road to admire my bicycle a few days after I returned to Lincoln from Iowa. That day, I was riding to campus when the man said to me: “What a beautiful bicycle you have.” No one had ever said that about my bicycle, or even noticed it, so I smiled while thanking him. I was about to continue my ride when he said: “Where are you from?” “Nigeria,” I replied. “East or North?” he inquired. He must have been to Nigeria to be asking, I thought. I said: “East. Have you been to Nigeria?” His response was a flat “no,” and his face had the mirthless expression of one trying to disassociate himself from something obscene. Yet, he seemed eager to say more. But rather than displeasing me by rebuffing my suggestion that he had been to my country, he asked, calmly, his eyes following my face, as if searching for something that was never lost, “What do you have to say about the violence in northern Nigeria?”  

He was referring to a bomb blast in Borno. I wanted to end the conversation at once and move on, so without responding to his question, I asked him: “What do you have to say about the attack on Trump, one of America’s most guarded former presidents, at his campaign in Pennsylvania?” He shrugged before saying: “Well, it seems there’s violence everywhere in the world now.” Before I could say: “No, I am talking about violence in America,” he increased his pace, crossed the road and walked away. The Borno blast occurred in late June, the Trump incident in mid-July, just three days before we met, but this American was more infatuated with the Nigerian experience than the one immediate to him. I’ve always wondered why, and each time it seems to me that the Nigerian crisis fed his imagination about Africa as a continent of endless chaos.  

In May, an Egyptian friend of mine called to share something that unsettled him. A white professor in his department had asked him whether he’d return to Egypt—“to his family”—as she put it, after his studies. When he told her he planned to stay back in the US for a year, the professor recoiled, perhaps terrified by his response. From that day, she stopped talking to him, even in class. My friend didn’t know if he said something wrong, so he sought my opinion on the matter. Since he recently got a teaching offer in a university in Egypt, I suggested to him to tell the professor that he’d return to his country. He did that and called back to tell me he’d never seen the woman more excited. She even offered to buy him a coffee later that day. Is the professor racist? I don’t know. But she has shown her commitment in upholding America’s whiteness. 

For several months, I didn’t talk about racism with black people. Except once, with my friend, a graduate student in an elite writing program here in America. As someone who lived in privilege and wealth in Nigeria, my friend is possibly more affected by the principalities of whiteness than me. When he called, his voice was a sad hymnal because a classmate had asked him: “Did you write before coming to America?” Another said: “How come you speak English so well?” In the thought of these Americans, Nigerians do not write or speak good English. When they managed to get over the unscrupulous interrogation and started sharing stories, my friend told a story about a friend of his who had bought a G Wagon. One of the Americans screamed: “A G Wagon in Madagascar?” She couldn’t visualize an African living a luxurious life. We can excuse the parochialism of these students, but what do we do about my friend’s professor who, during a lecture, kept on saying that there was a war in Nigeria which made my friend flee to America? Well, there’s a war in Nigeria, but not the kind the professor had imagined. The war in Nigeria is the failure of leadership.  

“But, Darlington, I didn’t flee any war,” my friend said, as he narrated his experience. “We didn’t flee any war,” I added as a succor. The idea of America as a sanctuary was the only way the professor could make sense of my friend’s presence in this country. His proximity to America is only legitimate if he needs to be saved by whiteness. This man resembles a colleague who uses every opportunity to remind me and himself that our department is extraordinarily diverse, which is why we have several graduate students and faculty from Africa. He says this in a way that suggests our presence in the department is a function of a quota system, that if they were not diverse, we wouldn’t have qualified to be here.  

What is troubling about racism, the subtle, gentler ones that constitute my experience in America, is that despite its pervasiveness, we don’t know how deeply involved we are in it, whether we’re its victims or perpetrators, or both. Sometimes in questioning what is racist and what is not, we play the role of a detective, a position we neither admire nor are fully aware of. Both the racist and their victim are mired in a system that muddies everyone. Racism is doing to America what colonialism did to Europe. Chinua Achebe pointed this out in The Education of a British-Protected Child, where he noted that “the colonizer was also wounded by the system he had created. He may not have lost land and freedom, like his colonized victim, but he paid a number of seemingly small prices, like the loss of a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of proportion, a sense of humor.” Unlike the colonizer and the racist, their victims can still speak with conscience, even if the world chooses not to listen. 

But my students listen to me and respond, even if our class features “deep, uncomfortable subjects,” as one of them once observed. “Among the Igbo, the art of conversation is regarded very highly,” Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart. Conversations are so important to me that I engage with writers and stir them to speak about the life force of their work. The writers and I perform the function of cultural regeneration, the kind that refuses the racist erasure of nonwhite people and cultures. Again, I return to Things Fall Apart to account for much of my worldview: “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.” I think the racist stands on a spot to observe the world. It doesn’t matter how vastly they travel, how racially and culturally mixed their environment is, to the racist, every ground is white.  

No matter where you come from, if you are not white in America, you are or may soon be a victim of white principality. You may not know how to deal with it because it’s often benign. Sometimes it manifests in friends who, by their association with you, consider themselves wholly liberated from the clutch of white supremacy. So, unlike other white people who are loudly racist, these friends do not see race. But how can they not see race when we are obviously enclosed by it? “There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory of whiteness,” says Claudia Rankine. I had been a guest at a friend’s family lunch, a wonderful event I remember fondly because they received me graciously. As we were dinning, the subject of my friend’s plans to visit Nigeria came up and his relative, who had visited an African country several years ago for tourism, kept on asking me about the violence in the north. It didn’t matter that I had never been to the north. It didn’t matter that I came to the US, despite the incidents of gun violence I read about the country. I simply told her that I now live in Lincoln and, as such, am more concerned about the random emails I receive from my university notifying me of gun-wielding white men in the streets looking for people to shoot. Everyone at the table laughed, including the relative, who went on to tell me how much she enjoyed vacationing in Africa. 

America wants to be anything but black. In dealing with the principalities of whiteness, there’s a model to learn from. But nothing prepared me for my experiences with nonwhite people who consolidate anti-blackness. In my first month in Lincoln, I lived with an Indian American woman who was born in the US to biracial parents. She could pass as white. She recognised this power and used it often in her relation to black people. Once, she asked me for a spoon. I was handing her the utensil when she said: “Did you wash it with soap?” My response was swift, “Have you related with a Nigerian before?” She nodded and said: “Yes.” Then I interjected, “I take it that you heard we don’t take nonsense lightly.” It dawned on me then that hers was a world in which the dignity of a black person was always questioned. When I told my students this story, as we discussed the rhetoric of race, one of them suggested that my neighbor might be a germophobe. It’s possible. But it’s also true that America is more heavily invested in the principalities of whiteness than we all realise or are willing to admit. James Baldwin lamented this all his life, so I’ll let him speak last: “The crime of which I accuse my country and countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them is that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” Those who will not listen to me cannot afford to ignore Baldwin who knew America intimately.