“Being proud of being a black was just a recent concept for me because growing up in Zambia nobody thinks about the color of their skin. We are just human beings… we are just who we are. Moving to the US opened my eyes to different cultures, different ethnicities in a way I wasn’t exposed to before… I feel like being here helped me really appreciate specifically who I am as an African. Being a part of an African culture is a good experience because it’s different and made me just want to stand out more and embrace that side of me more especially being here in the US… So moving here opened my eyes to stay in touch with that side of me even more because it is so prominent here… It’s almost like an identity for many people. So it almost made me want to claim my culture even more as part of my identity because I guess it is part of who people are here, where they are from and the culture they’d grown up in…
I am grateful that I had that experience growing up in Zambia because I grew up there until I was 15 so I was pretty established in myself. So coming here wasn’t like a thing where I had to change myself to fit in to the people here. If anything I wanted to stand out even more as an African because… no one could tell me anything about being African. No one could say anything to me that would bring me down or anything like that because there was no room to say anything because they knew that I was confident and proud of who I am. And it wasn’t even a conscious effort of being proud of being Zambian. I just was. I feel like it brought a special flavor to the environment. I will say that my pride definitely grew when I came here but it also was a natural thing... I couldn’t be anyone else. I definitely got to embrace it more and understand what it means to be Zambian even more being here.”
— Tidale, Zambian, 22
