The Sunday Story: "I didn't know I was Black until I came to this country"

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🗓️ 18 June 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

One in ten Black people living in the U.S. is an immigrant, and many Black immigrants—particularly those born in African nations—have settled in the South, according to a Pew Research report from 2022. This statistic caught Code Switch editor Leah Donnella's eye. And she wanted to know: how have Black immigrants redefined their sense of identity in the South, while confronting American racism? In this episode of The Sunday Story, Leah tells host Ayesha Rascoe about the people she met in Tennessee.

You can read and listen to more of Leah's reporting, as part of her Above the Fray fellowship, here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Leah D'Nella is an editor on the MPR podcast Code Switch.
0:04.5	So she spends a lot of time reading reports on demographics.
0:08.0	She's always looking for trends that might lead to good conversations.
0:12.6	And we know code switches full of those good conversations.
0:16.4	But one day, something caught her eye.
0:19.2	A new finding and a Pew Research report.
0:22.4	For the first time ever, the report noted one in 10 Black Americans is an immigrant
0:28.1	and many have settled in the South.
0:31.8	You're listening to the Sunday story. I'm Aisha Roscoe.
0:36.0	This statistic got Leah wondering what it must be like to be a Black person in the US,
0:41.2	but not from the US. What does it feel like to confront the kind of racism that is unique to
0:47.2	this country? How does it affect one sense of identity? Leah joins me now to talk about some of
0:53.6	what she's learned at the months of reporting. Hi, Leah.
0:57.1	Hi, Aisha. How's it going?
0:59.4	That's going really well. And so I got to ask you,
1:03.0	you got started on this project because of that statistic, that one in 10 Black Americans are immigrants.
1:11.9	Why did that statistic surprise you? It surprises me because a lot of times when we talk about the
1:17.7	Black experience, we're not necessarily talking about immigrants.
1:20.8	Yeah, I mean, it probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did because a lot of my friends
1:27.6	are Black immigrants. So even though I know a lot of people who fall into that category,
1:33.2	often when we're talking about Black issues in the US, we're not talking about immigrant issues.
1:39.0	And a lot of the time when we hear about immigrants, people are not generally referring to Black
	...

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