Thando

Sorry but the discourse around Tyla’s identity has exposed something that deserves to be called out: expecting Africans to understand themselves primarily through a Black American racial framework, while refusing to engage with African’s countries’ racial hierarchies and colonial histories, is a form of xenocentrism that has already become xenophobic in this case. At some point there has to be intellectual curiosity from BA. Black Americans are not the only Black people with histories of racialisation, colonialism or oppression. South Africa’s racial classifications for example emerged from a distinct colonial and apartheid system with its own categories, meanings and consequences. Those histories cannot simply be overwritten by an American understanding of race, simply because Tyla wants to market herself to the BA audience. It doesn’t work like that. Tyla did not invent South Africa’s racial hierarchy any more than Black Americans invented Jim Crow or the one-drop rule. Both are products of white supremacy, but they developed differently in different places. Expecting her to reject the identity that was historically imposed, negotiated and understood within her own country simply to satisfy an American racial framework is insane.