Coming out as African American

Jamin Kuhn
Nov 1 · 5 min read

My skin is white. Sometimes it is more red or pink. Sometimes it is pale. I have a lack of melanin. I remember that in Elementary school my friends would call my sister and I tomatoes when we would hang upside down on the jungle bars for a long time. I was never offended by that, maybe a little annoyed, but never offended. See I was born in Swaziland in 1987. My Father, Mother, Sister, and Brother had come there as missionaries in 1986. My father supported our family through his work at UNISWA at Luyengo. He was a plant breeder and professor there. I was born in August of 1987 in Swaziland (now called EsWatini), and I will always consider EsWatini my home. EsWatini is a small, small country ruled by a King (YES!). I lived not to far from South Africa which was an apartheid state, but in SD (as we called for short) there was no type of segregation. On the University campus our neighborhood was like a mini United Nations. To the left of our house lived a family from Zambia. To the right a Swazi family with some scary dogs. Down the street there were two Nigerian families. Down the hill was a family from Malawi, and even further down the hill there was an Indian family. Through the Malkerns church that we attended we knew an Afrikaans couple who became like our grandparents, but we just called them Uncle Ian and Auntie Bev. I did not really know of the concept of racism at this point.

When I was almost 13 my family decided to bring to the US. This tore me apart. Swaziland was my home, and now against my will I was being ripped from my home by my family. I wrote them a letter saying that they were killing me by making this decision. My Father had good reasons for us leaving, but he has always said that it was a very hard decision.

When we arrived in the US I had shut down. I was broken apart. I turned 13 and celebrated it by going to Six Flags and riding a roller coaster for the first time. When I entered 8th grade at Riverdale Baptist School I generally expected that it might be a good place because most of the students looked like the people I had grown up with. What I found out was much different.

At the age of 13 I had a thick Swazi accent, but spoke perfect English. When back in Swaziland once I had been mistaken for a black Swazi over the phone because of my accent. I bring this up because this is one the first things that my peers ridiculed me about. They ridiculed me because I had a “wierd African” accent. What I thought was, “no you have a weird accent, and why would you make fun of Africa considering your ancestry is African.” The they ridiculed me about Swaziland. “Is that a theme park?” they would say. It was made obvious to me in this majority black school in Prince Georges County that I was weird and not accepted. What made things worse was that some black peers would (intentionally and unintentionally) teach me how “black” people should act and how “white” people should act. I began to learn that society was seperated by race or racial behavior. How should I be accepted? I need to fit into the White concept or the Black concept. I did not really like either, but I remember going back and forth. One day I decided that the best way to deal with my situation was to hide who I actually was to everyone. I had to act like somebody I wasn’t.

The combination of being torn from my home and coming to a place where people who looked like my friends in SD were rejecting me was the cause of years of depression and sadness. I did have some good friends in High School like one friend who’s family was from Ghana and she had been born in the states. We had a famous exchange in which I told her that she was not a real African because she was not born in Ghana. She was a good friend and persisted despite that, and we are still friends today.

So, yes I am African American. I am an American and a Swazi. Why do I tell my story? For two reasons. One, my life story is very important to me and those who love. Two, I hope you can realize that our current simplistic concepts of racism or race relations are far from simple. They are quite complicated. I have been reading “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray. His thesis is that social scientists are using identity politics as a ramming tool for another agenda. This means that being Gay is not just being attracted to the same sex anymore. It is more than that. Being a minority race in no longer about your ethnicity or skin color but something more, or dare I say about being more equal or better. How being a feminist is no longer about standing up for the human rights of females, but it is not about making men seem cancerous. How transgender people are used in the same way. People use the concept of them to push an underlying political agenda. I should add that this book is written by a Gay man.

In closing, the word racism in America has no meaning anymore. We need to go back to our dictionaries. We also need to realize that have to turn our attention from people’s race and look to their needs. We are being forced to focus on the race of people so much that this could un do many things that the Civil Rights movement fought for. For starters, “White Supremacy” has nothing to do with economic innequality. White supremacists are people who are intent on killing and destroying all other races except for white people. They are convinced that people of other races are not quite human. I am not a white supremacist, I am an African American.

From left to Right: Mlungisi, Gwanele, Jamin. This was on my trip back to Swaziland 15 years after I had left in 2015.

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